A reported "sheen" in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana is likely the result of large amounts of sediment, not spilled oil, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Sunday.

The Coast Guard collected and tested samples of a dark substance after receiving varying reports on Saturday of possible pollution floating on and beneath the water's surface. The largest sighting described the substance as stretching 100 miles into the Gulf, south of Grand Isle, Louisiana.

An analysis found only trace amounts of petroleum hydrocarbons, oil and grease -- all at levels well within the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality's clean water standard.

Sediment carried down the Mississippi River and possibly agitated by dredging is believed to have caused the dark substance, according to a Coast Guard news release.

The Coast Guard also investigated on Sunday an oily substance washing up along the Louisiana shoreline.

Samples of that substance will be tested. It is not suspected to be residual oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in April.

The move will see AT&T broadband users forced into a tiered Internet that would limit accounts to a paltry 150 gigabytes a month. Users who download too much information on AT&T's broadband network will be subject to an additional $10 fee for every 50 gigabytes. Fees on the first three overages will be waived, according to DSLReports.com.

In layman's terms, if you're used to watching Netflix, playing online video games or using your computer to share files with your friends or engage in other bandwidth-intensive activity, get ready to be slammed with additional fees.

On Friday, a Minnesota jury found that a blogger must pay $60,000 in damages because of statements he published in his blog about a public figure who was subsequently fired from his job. Internet publishers and free speech advocates should pay close attention to this case if it is appealed because the blogger was found liable even though the jury did not find that the blogger's statements were false.

This decision is the latest example of the law's apparent struggle to apply basic constitutional protections to internet publishers. If the Minnesota ruling holds up, it will mean that bloggers will have to worry they will be forced to pay for true statements that they publish that cause a person damages.

Rustock was taken down, piece by piece, in a similar way to the Mega-D botnet. First the master controllers, the machines that send out commands to enslaved zombies, were identified. Microsoft quickly seized some of these machines located in the U.S. for further analysis, and worked with police in the Netherlands to disable some of the command structure outside of the U.S.

The national debt jumped by $72 billion on Tuesday even as the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for just three weeks that will cut $6 billion from government spending.

Housing starts posted their biggest decline in 27 years in February while building permits dropped to their lowest level on record, suggesting the beleaguered real estate sector has yet to rebound from its deepest slump in modern history.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- It's not always easy to feel sorry for sunny Florida. But they just got hit with another blow.

On Thursday, the Census Bureau revealed that 18% -- or 1.6 million -- of the Sunshine State's homes are sitting vacant. That's a rise of more than 63% over the past 10 years.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The iconic image of America at the dawn of the 21str century is homeless Americans camped out in front of boarded-up houses. There is no clearer image of the failure of the government and the financial system than this stark reality.

The need for reform was made especially clear by recent research revealing that travelers are avoiding two to three trips per year due to unnecessary hassles associated with the security screening process. These avoided trips come at a cost of $85 billion and 900,000 jobs to the American economy.

He owes $455,203.14 to cover the costs of his stay at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet. Hawkins has been in prison since Nov. 19, 1982. His jailer is also his debt collector.

Hawkins is fighting in court to stop the state from seizing about $11,000 in his bank account to partially satisfy the debt. The 60-year-old earned the money by working while he's been behind bars, making about $75 a month.

Webmaster's Commentary:

So, the state throws you in jail, then bills you for the cost of your stay, sells your services to the prison industries literally at slave-labor wages, then grabs the wages? And this is supposed to teach the inmate the value of working within society?!?

The leader of a group that marketed a fake currency called Liberty Dollars in the Asheville area and elsewhere has been found guilty by a federal jury of conspiracy against the government in a case of “domestic terrorism.

Michigan legislators have approved a bill authorizing state-appointed emergency financial managers to break union contracts that struggling cities and school districts have with their workers.

Following up on the state Senate’s passage of the bill last week, the House passed the bill 62-48 on Tuesday, sending the legislation to Republican Gov. Rick Snyder for final approval. Snyder, who asked for the expanded powers for emergency financial managers, is expected to sign the bill into law.

Supporters say the bill gives the state a way to step into distressed municipalities and schools before they collapse. It also gives emergency financial managers broad authority to end employee union contracts, and to nullify elected boards and councils.Read Full Article

"Big employers in the US are increasingly using part-time and temporary workers to hold down labor costs, according to the latest figures from the Labor Department. In a trend that has been accelerated over the last two years, corporations are moving to phase out full time positions and create a workforce earning far lower wages and fewer, if any, benefits that can be hired and fired at will."

ie How to create a more subservient dependent workforce, unable to argue about poor wages and conditions...

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II. But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America. Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?

HAAVARA, a company for the transfer of Jewish property from Nazi Germany to Palestine. The Trust and Transfer Office Haavara Ltd., was established in Tel Aviv, following an agreement with the German government in August 1933, to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine by allowing the transfer of their capital in the form of German export goods.

Webmaster's Commentary:

But, but, but, but ... TV and movies told me Hitler personally tortured ate all those 6 million Jews, which is why Americans must send their money to Israel. Wait a moment; that doesn't even make any sense!!!

Rash of wife killings by Special Forces and bombing of wrong targets in Afghanistan may be due to drug induced paranoia.

Today, the Pentagon has admitted that they provided speed to the U.S Armed Forces during the Gulf War and are doing the same with military personnel in Afghanistan. A report called " Performance Maintenance During Continuous Flight Operations", produced by the Naval Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola, Florida outlines the Pentagon practice of providing speed to pilots. The report "The Use of Amphetamines in U.S. Air Force Tactical Operations during Desert Shield and Storm", by Emonson DL and Vanderbeek RD outlines the use of speed during the Gulf War. A statement issued by the US Air Force Surgeon General's Office also confirmed the use of amphetamines by pilots. It said: "During contingency and combat operations, aviators are often required to perform their duties for extended periods without rest. While we have many planning and training techniques to extend our operations, prescribed drugs are sometimes made available to counter the effects of fatigue during these operations. The Pentagon, is in addition, providing "downers" after pilots binge on "uppers." In order to help the pilots sleep after a "binge" they are given a dosage of the sedative Temazepam (Restoril). These dosages of "uppers" and than "downers" have a devastating effect on the pilots judgement and overall mental health.

God did not create the universe, Stephen Hawking revealed yesterday. In the flurry of publicity preceding his new book, The Grand Design, to be published next week, he does some serious dissing of the Almighty, declaring him/her/it irrelevant. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature. But, we might ask, where did they come from?

Elected Reps. chose to hide details from American public for fear of reprisals from “the big forces” that run the media and the presidencyOver 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts released this week by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee highlight the fact that several Senators knew that the White House and the Pentagon had deceived the American people over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.The latest releases, which document skepticism over the pretext for entry into the Vietnam war, date from 1968.Four years into the war, senators were at loggerheads with Lyndon B. Johnson. At the time Foreign Relations Committee meetings were held behind closed doors.

The contents of a secretly recorded video threaten to gravely embarrass not only Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister but also the US administration of Barack Obama.Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

Webmaster's Commentary:

With geopolitical "friends" like this guy.........who needs enemies?!?

Prior to 1913, there was no federal income tax, the states had rights and representation in Washington DC, there was no Federal Reserve Bank and the federal government lived under the enumerated powers afforded it within the US Constitution. What a difference one year can make.Almost a hundred years later, it’s clear that the policies established in 1913 must be revoked in order to restore power to the people and the states. But can the American people get the Genie back in the bottle?The History of the US Tax System can be summed up in one paragraph:“Prior to the enactment of the income tax, most citizens were able to pursue their private economic affairs without the direct knowledge of the government. Individuals earned their wages, businesses earned their profits, and wealth was accumulated and dispensed with little or no interaction with government entities.”

Introductory Note -- BenjaminH. Freedman was one of the most intriguing and amazing individuals of the 20th century.

Mr. Freedman, born in 1890,was a successful Jewish businessman of New York City who was at one time the principal owner of the Woodbury Soap Company. He broke with organized Jewry after the Judeo-Communist victory of 1945, and spent the remainder of his life and the great preponderance of his considerable fortune, at least 2.5 million dollars, exposing the Jewish tyranny which has enveloped theUnited States.

Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) said, “The establishment of a central bank is 90% of communizing a nation.” [1] Worldwide control obviously requires extraordinary organization, superior weaponry and high technology (like HAARP), political power and monopoly control of all the resources. On February 17, 1950, James P. Warburg declared to the U.S. Senate, “We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.” [2] In Russia and China and other countries, the elite used thugs for their violent conquest of existing leaders.

Nothing like this had ever happened before – the total destruction of the national currency, plus the wiping out of people’s savings and businesses. On top of this came a global depression. Germany had no choice but to succumb to debt slavery under international bankers until 1933, when the National Socialists came to power.

Celebratory gunfire and horns were heard in Benghazi and Tobruk immediately after the vote.

Sky News correspondent Emma Hurd, in Tobruk, said: "Clearly everybody in this town and further to the west in Benghazi have been watching their televisions waiting for the news from the UN in New York and this is exactly what they wanted to hear.

Western jets open fire on Gaddafi's forces as world leaders declare 'the time for action has come'

The news site said the head of the company recently met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli intelligence chief Aviv Cokhavi. It added that the officials all approved the company's recruitment of mercenaries to help Gadhafi.

Rebels driven out of town of Brega under heavy bombardment as pro-regime forces advance towards Benghazi

Webmaster's Commentary:

ISRAEL KEEPS THE WORLD UNDER THE YOKE OF DICTATORSHIP!

In Palestine, in the attack on the aid flotilla, and now with Israel's mercenaries in Libya, Israel shows its true face to the world. The nation once claimed to be the only Democracy in the Middle East is now working to crush Democracy everywhere across the globe through covert action, subversion, and outright intervention; to bring the world into a global dictatorship to serve the hellish doctrine that one group of people has a God-given right to all of life's blessings and everyone else should be forced to live on the scraps that drop from Israel's table.

We see Israel for what it truly is.

Do not let Israel get away with hiding behind the tragedy of the quake and tsunami, Please link the above video everywhere it being reported that Qaddafi is defeating the Democracy movement in Libya, because Qaddafi isn't doing it; Israel is, and Qaddafi in the aftermath will be as much a slave to Israel as the US Government.

With all the focus placed on the Japanese radiation leak as well as the toxic plume of radioactive particles (possibly containing uranium and plutonium) heading for the United States, another potential disaster is receiving virtually no attention.

Of course, attention should be paid to the Japanese situation. Especially since the mainstream media is doing everything it can to cover up the scale of the disaster. Nevertheless, it seems the continent of North America is being hit from two sides in terms of radiation danger.

On March 16, a report was released by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) stating that Canada’s Ontario Power Generation has released radioactive water into Lake Ontario via a leak in the Pickering A nuclear generating station.

The real time radiation monitoring by prefecture is showing radiation levels in the city of Ibaraki going from 639 to 2040 in the last 12 hours! Click for larger imageHowever, Ibaraki is 83 miles from the Fukushima power station! Click for larger imageBut there is another nuclear power station right next to Ibaraki, theTōkai Nuclear Power Plant, which has one operational reactor and one decommissioned reactor, with an undetermined status of the spent fuel rods.

It seems unlikely that radiation from Fukushima is the reason for the radiation surge at Ibaraki in the last 12 hours, without corresponding increases in other cities within 80 miles of the Fukushima reactors. Of course, there are no readings from Fukushimna or Miyagi prefectures at all and maybe the entire coastline for 100 miles is rapidly becoming hotter. But given the nearly identical circumstances of nuclear power stations on the shoreline added to massive quake and tsunami, one must wonder if there is more damage to the other coastal nuclear power stations than is being admitted to.

One thing is obvious from the radiation surge; something bad just happened somewhere!

While much of the mainstream media appears to be moving on from the impending Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently released some startling and dire news about the now-empty spent fuel rod pool in the plant's Reactor 4. According to the NRC, a crack or hole in the empty pool is preventing efforts to refill it -- and since the pool does not have the same containment apparatuses that the actual reactors have, a fire or explosion could release the pool's 130 tons of uranium directly into the environment.

Webmaster's Commentary:

I wonder if President {Pussy (now safely on South America) chose this moment to start WW3 in Libya and Congress (now also on vacation who knows where) let him do it because they needed a distraction from this radioactive hell unleashed on us all by Japan/GE/Stuxnet!

Crews fighting to cool reactors at Japan's stricken nuclear plant struggled Sunday to switch partial power back on after a natural disaster that has left more than 20,000 people dead or missing.

The discovery of radiation in foodstuffs in regions around the plant, and of traces of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water well to the southwest, compounded public anxiety but authorities said there was no danger to health.

Webmaster's Commentary:

In the midst of this catastrophe, Japanese officials are behaving as though their hair was on fire, but they are unable to smell the smoke. One senses a real feeling of denial on the part of government officials relative to the current and potential damage this disaster has caused., and may yet cause.

The Japanese people - and people around the world - have every right to be skeptical right now, and get as much hard information as they possibly can on their own.

The unshaven man in a tracksuit stops his bicycle on the roadside and glances over his shoulder to check that he is unobserved. Satisfied, he reaches quickly into the sludge-filled gutter, picks up a discarded ready-meal and stuffs it into a plastic carrier bag.

In another time, another place, Kazuhiro Takahashi could be taken for a tramp, out scavenging for food after a long night on the bottle. In fact, he is just another hungry victim of Japan’s tsunami trying to find food for his family.

“I am so ashamed,” says the 43-year-old construction worker after he realises he has been spotted. “But for three days we haven’t had enough food. I have no money because my house was washed away by the tsunami and the cash machine is not working.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

This catastrophe, as it plays out, is an horrific, cautionary tale about how contemporary civilization can collapse in a heartbeat, either by natural disasters, human error, or a combination of both, as we have seen here in Japan.

Everything this site has been saying about preparedness, having a plan to locate loved ones, and having extra non-perishables around, is something every one who reads this site should be thinking about right now.

Be able, as much as possible, should a disaster strike in the US, to be self-sufficient, and don't wait for the US government to "save" you and your family; look at its response to Hurricane Katrina, or more recently, the Gulf oil disaster, which is still claiming victims of physical injury and death due to the water and land contamination it caused.

The unshaven man in a tracksuit stops his bicycle on the roadside and glances over his shoulder to check that he is unobserved. Satisfied, he reaches quickly into the sludge-filled gutter, picks up a discarded ready-meal and stuffs it into a plastic carrier bag.

In another time, another place, Kazuhiro Takahashi could be taken for a tramp, out scavenging for food after a long night on the bottle. In fact, he is just another hungry victim of Japan’s tsunami trying to find food for his family.

“I am so ashamed,” says the 43-year-old construction worker after he realises he has been spotted. “But for three days we haven’t had enough food. I have no money because my house was washed away by the tsunami and the cash machine is not working.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

This catastrophe, as it plays out, is an horrific, cautionary tale about how contemporary civilization can collapse in a heartbeat, either by natural disasters, human error, or a combination of both, as we have seen here in Japan.

Everything this site has been saying about preparedness, having a plan to locate loved ones, and having extra non-perishables around, is something every one who reads this site should be thinking about right now.

Be able, as much as possible, should a disaster strike in the US, to be self-sufficient, and don't wait for the US government to "save" you and your family; look at its response to Hurricane Katrina, or more recently, the Gulf oil disaster, which is still claiming victims of physical injury and death due to the water and land contamination it caused.

Here's How to Help Support the Body's Healing After Intense Radioactive Contamination or Radiation Exposure ... The book ain't pretty, but the Radiation Detox Info is FREE

Here is the link for the radiation detox e-book.. Do not panic if you cannot get any potassium iodide right now. There are additional supplements you can take as set out in this booklet.I have not read it yet but a quick scan of the contents tells me it is useful....Connie ( It is 123 pages . Print it out or you can read it on line)

The incident is a reminder that preparedness should include being prepared for nuclear events with foods and medicinals in our medical cabinets that will protect us and our families as much as humanly and medically possible. Many people in Japan and elsewhere around the world that live and work close to nuclear plants will be seriously affected by nuclear accidents. When a meltdown happens the effects can be carried thousands of miles by the prevailing winds.

It is unclear how far the impact of a meltdown might reach. In the United States, local communities plan for evacuation typically within 10 miles of a nuclear plant. However, states must be ready to cope with contamination of food and water as far as 50 miles away. When it comes to risks and toxic exposure levels we can count on the government and medical officials to understate the threat. This is something consistent in their approach to all types of toxic exposures.

People know that it's good to take potassium iodide to protect against radiation, to help protect against thyroid cancer (potassium iodide does not protect any other organs).

But taking potassium iodide when there is no radiation can actually damage the thyroid gland ... at least in some individuals. A doctor told me that potassium iodide is given to people with hyperthyroid disease in order to partially kill the thyroid - i.e. to lower thyroid function.

With the tragedy in Japan continuing to unfold as we speak, most news coverage has focused on the death toll resulting from the earthquake and tsunami. Some coverage has also been given to the meltdown of the Japanese nuclear reactors. However, there has been very little discussion in the mainstream media of the attempted cover-up of problems at seventeen reactors that malfunctioned in 2003, or that the radioactive particles from the latest full-blown catastrophe could soon be reaching the western United States as early as March 25th.

An estimated 80,000 people who were born or lived in the United States in the past 50 years have contracted or will contract cancer because of fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, according to an analysis of government studies. Well over 15,000 of them are estimated to be fatal.

The government exploded 215 A- and H-bombs above ground between 1951 and 1963, half at the Nevada Test Site and the others in the Pacific Islands.

The following are major nuclear accidents around the world since the former Soviet Union set up the world's first nuclear power plant in 1954:

On Oct. 10, 1957, a fire broke out at the Windscale nuclear reactor (later renamed Sellafield) in northwest England, destroying the core and releasing a cloud of radioactive material. The sale of milk and other produces from nearby farms were banned for a month. Scores of people later developed cancer and died because of exposure to radiation.

On March 28, 1979, a partial core meltdown occurred at Three Mile Island in the United States due to its cooling system failure, in the most severe nuclear leak accident in the country which forced the evacuation of at least 150,000 local residents.

On April 26, 1986, the No.4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the former Soviet Union exploded, causing the worst nuclear disaster in history. The explosion killed 30 people on the spot, released more than eight tons of highly radioactive material, contaminated 60,000 square km of land, and caused more than 3.2 million people to be affected by radiation.

On April 6, 1993, a tank containing radioactive liquid exploded at the Tomsk-7 Reprocessing Complex in the Siberian region of Russia. A total of 10 square km of land was contaminated by radioactive material and a number of nearby villages were evacuated.

On Sept. 30, 1999, a nuclear accident occurred at a nuclear fuel plant at Tokai village, Ibaraki prefecture, Japan, killing two workers, exposing dozens of people to radiation and forcing the evacuation of local residents.

On Aug. 9, 2004, four workers were killed and seven others injured by a steam leak at the No.3 reactor at Kansai Electric's Mihama power plant, 350 km west of Tokyo, Japan.

Specifically, in 1959, there was a meltdown of one-third of the nuclear reactors at the Santa Susana field laboratory operated by Rocketdyne, releasing - according to some scientists' estimates - 240 times as much radiation as Three Mile Island.

But the Atomic Energy Commission lied and said only there was only 1 partially damaged rod, and no real problems. In fact, the AEC kept the meltdown a state secret for 20 years.

According to the security company, the virus is designed to target a German-made program often used in systems managing water, gas and oil pipelines. The program is used at public utilities around the world, including in Japan.

So now the difficulty the Fukushima nuclear plant operators faced in recovering control over their runaway reactors takes on a darker significance. Remember that the first problem following the quake was that the automated shutdown systems failed to operate at some of the reactors, because pumps failed and valves would not open even while running on batteries; the very sorts of mischief Stuxnet supposedly was designed to cause at Iran's power station.

Did we all just get hacked to death by Israel?

Would anyone reading this in Japan please forward to the Fukushima managers.

Stuxnet, a computer virus designed to attack servers isolated from the Internet, such as at power plants, has been confirmed on 63 personal computers in Japan since July, according to major security firm Symantec Corp.

....More specifically, were the components responsible for an inability to obtain useful information about water/pressure/temperature levels, cited by the World Nuclear Association, controlled by Siemens PLCs?

Bridenbaugh told ABC News that he believes the design flaws that prompted his resignation from GE were eventually addressed at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Bridenbaugh said GE agreed to a series of retrofits at Mark 1 reactors around the globe. He compared the retooling to the bolstering of highway bridges in California to better withstand earthquakes.

"Like with seismic refitting, they went back and re-analyzed the loads the structures might receive and beefed up the ability of the containment to handle greater loads," he said.

When asked if that was sufficient, he paused. "What I would say is, the Mark 1 is still a little more susceptible to an accident that would result in a loss of containment."

ABC News asked GE for more detail about how the company responded to critiques of its Mark 1 design. GE spokesman Michael Tetuan said in an email that, over the past 40 years, the company has made several modifications to its Mark 1 reactors in the U.S., including installing "quenchers" and fortifying the steel structures "to accommodate the loads that were generated." He said that GE's responses to modifications ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were also shared with the Japanese nuclear industry.

Whatever about Japanese engineering standards, five of the six reactors and all four hit by explosions were designed by General Electric and built by US companies. The 1960's Mark I design is seriously flawed and there were warnings about these flaws to the effect that the primary containment vessel would be likely to burst if the fuel rods inside overheated. Three staff members resigned from General Electric in the 1970's as they were convinced that the Mark 1 was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.

Given that it was built right beside the sea and almost at sea level, the whole site was ill-protected from the scale of this particular tsunami, being designed for wave heights around 4-5 metres, not the 10 metre-high wave that engulfed the facility. As for the DBG's, nothing could have protected them and allowed them the air they need to function.

While there is always the possibility of conspiracys playing a part in events, I always prefer to apply Occam's razor and to start with the simplest answer first. In the case of 9/11, the simplest and most plausible answer is that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition. However, this case is different. In a world where profit is king, queen and the entire court, the tendency to under-engineer, in other words, to cut corners, is significant, even in a safety-critical industry such as nuclear power.

I'm very wary of this rash of stories relating to stuxnet and the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. It stinks of poisoning the well, perhaps by those who are responsible for what is probably the dumbest reactor design in the history of nuclear power. As far as I can see, the following are responsible for the failure of reactor cooling:

1.The possibility that the results of SQ (Seismic Qualification) tests for the reactors were faked.

2.The high probablity that the earthquake damaged the cores without damaging the containment.

3.Tsunami damage to the power grid infrastructure which would have been the first source of backup power to run the cooling system.

4.The placement of diesel backup generation equipment at ground level, which is barely above sea level at the Fukushima complex and as such wide open to inundation by tsunami. Anyone who knows anything about diesel engines knows they don't play well with water. A dumb design decision if ever there was one.

Face it, this reactor has to be the worst design possible, not only from the perspective of the backup diesel generators (which should have been located on a high point, say the reactor roof) but also from the location of the cooling tanks, which are believed to house around 11,000 spent nuclear fuel rods.

In a dumb design decision that is dumber than the other decision of the location of backup generation by a factor of thousands, the cooling tanks were located on the roofs of the reactors, right above the reactor cores. Their location means that in the current situation delivering active coolant is not possible and they are boiling off any coolant present. There are also rumours of cracks in the cooling tanks meaning that any new coolant delivered will drain away before it has any chance to have an effect.

As for Stuxnet being involved, the likelihood is very low. There is precious little evidence to support the claim, regardless as to what "computer experts" might say. As an explanation it ranks right alongside the "HAARP caused the earthquake" nonsense.

We are likely to be bombarded with bullshit when it comes to these failing reactors and the threats they pose. I suspect this is one of those volleys of bullshit.

The situation in Japan is getting worse, not better. There are shortages in food, fuel and warm dry shelter. To make matters exponentially worse, nuclear power plants there continue to burn out of control and emit high levels of radiation. Japan is a stark reminder of how fast a modern technologically advanced society can be brought to its knees by an unforeseen calamity.

On the other side of the Pacific, the devastating pictures from that island nation are taking the attention away from our own, much more predictable, calamity coming from a tsunami of debt. As the U.S. and other world governments continue to print money to keep the banks and system solvent, a ball of debt is growing. It is on course to swamp the system. In his latest report, Martin Armstrong, former Chairman of Princeton Economics and an expert in the study of economic cycles, said events happening in places like Japan or the Middle East are not the main issue the world is facing.

Armstrong said, “This is coming at a time when governments are broke. We have state and local governments in a debt crisis and that meltdown is very real!!!!!!! Government is collapsing. That is the issue.” Armstrong says because of all the money created to bail out failing banks, gold is gaining in price. “This is not just inflation. We are on the verge of a currency meltdown this time,” said Armstrong. (Click here to read the latest report from Martin Armstrong.)

Many in the mainstream media are claiming that the economy of Japan will bounce right back from this, but they are wrong. The tsunami decimated thousands of square miles. The loss of homes, cars, businesses and personal wealth is almost unimaginable. It is going to take many years to rebuild the roads, bridges, rail systems, ports, power lines and water systems that were lost. There are going to be a significant number of Japanese insurance companies and financial institutions that are going to be totally wiped out as a result of this great tragedy. Of course in the days ahead the Japanese people will band together and work hard to rebuild the nation, but the truth is that it is impossible to "bounce right back" from such a massive loss of wealth, assets and infrastructure.

The following are 14 reasons why the economic collapse of Japan has now begun....

The Bank of Japan has announced it has decided to flood the Japanese economy with 15 trillion yen. That is the equivalent of roughly $183 billion dollars. This is going to provide needed liquidity in the short-term, but it is also going to set Japan on a highly inflationary course.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock average declined by more than 6 percent on Monday. As the full extent of the damage becomes apparent more declines are likely.

Oil refineries all over Japan have been severely damaged or destroyed. For example, six refineries that combine to process 31 percent of the oil for Japan have been totally shut down at least for now.

The damage to roads, bridges, ports and rail systems is estimated to be in the billions of dollars. The damage done to power lines and water systems is almost unimaginable. It is going to take many years to rebuild the infrastructure of Japan.

Right now the flow of goods and services in many areas of northern Japan has been reduced to a crawl, and this is likely to remain the case for quite some time.

Many cities and towns along the east coast of Japan have essentially been destroyed.

Japan's nuclear industry is essentially dead in the water at this point. Even if there is not a full-blown nuclear meltdown, the events that have transpired already have frightened people enough to cause a massive public outcry against nuclear power in Japan.

Japan is going to need even more oil and natural gas in the long run to replace lost nuclear energy production. Prior to this crisis, Japan derived 29 percent of its electricity from nuclear power.

Japan is the second largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt, but that is about to change. Japan currently has about $882 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds and is going to have to liquidate much of that in order to fund the rebuilding of their nation.

Many factories in Japan are closing down at least temporarily. For example, Nissan (NSANY.PK) has shut down four factories and Sony (SNE) has shut down six factories.

Mizuho, the second-largest financial services company in Japan, has just locked out its customers from accessing their cash. Whether or not this is related to Zero Hedge reports from yesterday that the same bank is unable to complete ¥570 billion in transactions in unclear.

Shaken by the prospect of nuclear meltdown after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, Japanese investors will dump overseas assets on Monday and bring their money home to help finance reconstruction.

Positioning for this could send the dollar plummeting versus the yen on Monday and lead to a sharp slide in Treasuries since U.S. government bonds are a favorite asset of Japanese investors, market analysts said.

Stocks also are likely to come under pressure.

Japanese insurers will probably sell some of their most liquid foreign assets such as U.S. Treasuries so they can respond to the worst disaster since World War Two.

The crisis could lead to insured losses of nearly $35 billion, risk modeling company AIR Worldwide said, making it one of the most expensive disasters in history and nearly as much as the entire worldwide catastrophe loss for the global insurance industry.

Traders braced for just such an outcome on Friday, when the yen surged and Treasuries fell. The Bank of Japan probably will add money to the system to limit the liquidation of assets. But the big question remains of how much follow-through selling is yet to come.

Dan Fuss, the vice chairman of $150 billion Loomis Sayles, told Reuters on Sunday that his best guess is that Treasuries will continue to see losses.

Because Japan is the second-biggest holder of U.S. government debt and they have nearly $900 billion in dollar reserves, Fuss said Japan will likely use reserves for rebuilding.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This will hammer the US stock market. It might even collapse. No doubt the Fed has their printing presses switched into warp drive preparing to shore up the market and the banks, but absent massive wealth confiscation from the American people to "balance the books", this printing will only degrade the dollar further. DOW futures already headed down. "Black Monday?"

A massive selloff on the Tokyo Stock Exchange wiped out some 23.5 trillion yen ($287 billion) from the market's value on Monday with investors dumping stocks as the country recoiled from a devastating earthquake and struggled to avert nuclear disaster.

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A number of Japanese companies including NEC Corp. and Suzuki Motor Corp. joined others Sunday in announcing a temporary suspension of their domestic plants following Friday's massive earthquake in northeastern and eastern Japan, company officials said.

While some of their plants were hit by the quake and quake-triggered tsunami, many factories will be unable to operate due to a lack of parts and the need for inspection. A scheduled power outage could also halt operations at some plants, possibly affecting output of various products.

In a deepening tragedy, after an earthquake and tsunami caused four explosions at nuclear reactor plants in Japan, most of those who evacuated the area headed south, since winds normally would have pushed the radioactive clouds to the north and east. Instead, winds pushed the r-clouds south, according to The Australian. The shift in winds now threatens Hawaii with fallout from the Fukushima nuclear facilities.

Officials finally admit radiation has reached lethal levels in the area surrounding the explosions. Tokyo, 200 miles to the south, is also seeing higher levels of radiation. “[A]bnormal radiation and traces of radioactive elements were detected around Greater Tokyo, the world's most populous metropolitan region with 36 million people."

# Workers battling nuclear meltdown evacuated for hours today after radiation levels increased# French minister: 'Let's not beat about the bush, they've essentially lost control'# Radioactive steam spews into atmosphere from reactor number three# Experts warn that crisis is 'approaching point of no return' as officials run out of options# Officials commandeer police water cannon to spray complex# Attempts to dump water on reactors by helicopter fail# Two more previously stable reactors begin to heat up# The rich scramble to book private jets out the country as fleeing passengers pack Tokyo airportLots of pics.

The dumping was intended both to help cool the reactor and to replenish water in a pool holding spent fuel rods. The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said earlier that the pool was nearly empty, which might cause the rods to overheat.

American officials have also said that they believe the fuel holding pools at reactor three and four have boiled dry causing 'extremely high' radiation levels.

That means that nuclear fuel rods at both the reactors could overheat further and release more radiation.

Even when removed from reactors, uranium rods are still extremely hot and must be cooled for months, possibly longer, to prevent them from heating up again and emitting radioactivity.

One French expert warned that the plant is just hours away from disaster. Thierry Charles of the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety told the Telegraph: 'The next 48 hours will be decisive. I am pessimistic because, since Sunday, I have seen that almost none of the solutions has worked.'

FOREIGN COMPANIES START TO GO

Foreign companies have started pulling their staff out of Tokyo as fears of a nuclear catastrophe mount.

Multinational corporations have triggered emergency plans as power cuts have paralysed large swathes of the Japanese capital.

Some companies are already moving staff to other cities in Japan or sending overseas workers to nearby financial centres, such as Sydney.

Around 200 employees at the French bank Societe Generale are being transferred from Tokyo, while US fund managers BlackRock and Fidelity have started shifting trading staff to Hong Kong and Singapore.

German banks – including Commerzbank – have also notified staff to pull back.

Around 50 BMW workers and their families have taken up the car giant’s offer to repatriate all of its foreign workers.

But UK banks HSBC and Barclays last night insisted that it was ‘business as usual’ for their operations in the Japanese capital.

Foreign bankers are fleeing Tokyo as Japan's nuclear crisis worsens, scrambling for commercial and charter flights out of the country and into other major cities in the region.

BNP Paribas , Standard Chartered and Morgan Stanley were among the banks whose staff have left since Friday's earthquake and tsunami, and now a nuclear plant disaster, according to industry sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

3/17/2011 - YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan -- The following is information provided by Col. Otto Feather, 374th Airlift Wing commander, during a radio interview with American Forces Network during a radio interview at 2:45 p.m. March 17.

Our real thrust is taking care of our partners here in Japan. We're going to do everything so that, even though we're talking about voluntary departures, we're talking about civilians and kids that maybe want to get home to mom and grandma and what have you. So that will be what we're focusing on for those folks. But the rest of us in blue, and our brethren from the purple world, are going to be lockstep here with the Japanese, doing everything we can to take care of the recovery from this terrible tsunami and earthquake.

SAN DIEGO — The admiral in charge of all U.S. military forces in the Pacific region said on Thursday the military has developed contingency plans to evacuate 87,000 Americans — including Defense Department personnel — from Japan if the situation deteriorates.Adm. Robert Willard, who commands U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, told Pentagon reporters during a press conference Thursday evening that the United States, in a worst-case scenario, would be prepared to evacuate as many as 87,300 U.S. citizens, including military personnel and family members from Tokyo and the surrounding areas. That would include the large naval base in Yokosuka, located south of the capital near the entrance to Tokyo Bay and home to the forward-deployed aircraft carrier George Washington.

The report says a total of 200,000 US personnel to be evacuated from Japan to US West Coast. That seems like a very high number. If this is accurate, it must mean things in Japan are a lot worse than we are being told. /Sting Ray

SEATTLE, Wash. -- Thousands of U.S. military and Department of Defense personnel are being voluntarily evacuated from Japan to Seattle and Joint Base Lewis-McChord following last week’s earthquake and tsunami.

The USO confirmed Friday that 15,000 U.S. personnel and their dependents will be hosted at USO centers at SeaTac and JBLM in the coming days. The evacuation is part of the U.S. State Department's voluntary evacuation of U.S. personnel following growing concerns at nuclear plants in Japan.

Japan's mafia among the first to organise and deliver aidThe Straits TimesPublication Date : 21-03-2011The website reported that the day after the earthquake, the Inagawa-kai (the third-largest organised crime group in Japan) sent 25 trucks filled with paper diapers, instant ramen, batteries, torches, drinks and other essentials to the Tohoku region.The Daily Beast said the Kanagawa block of the Inagawa-kai has sent 70 trucks to the Ibaraki and Fukushima areas to drop off supplies in areas with high radiation levels - with yakuza members going in without any protection or potassium iodide.

Fears that America could be hit by the nuclear fallout from the Japan earthquake have dramatically increased as workers prepared to abandon a reactor crippled by the earthquake and tsunami last night in the face of what is set to become the world's second worst nuclear disaster - topped only by Chernobyl.

Webmaster's Commentary:

And soon to surpass it, because all six reactors at Fukushima are in trouble now, and all six have 40 years of spent fuel rods in those reactor buildings.

Seven nuclear reactors in Germany built before 1980 will be shut during a three-month review of nuclear-plant safety and the country's broader energy strategy, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday.

Mrs. Merkel also said she wanted the Group of 20 leading and emerging nations in France to discuss international nuclear-energy standards at a summit in November, and had asked French President Nicolas Sarkozy to add the discussion to the summit's agenda. WSJ

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.

FOLLOWING THESE INSTRUCTIONS MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE!The complete KFM instructions include patterns to be cut out and used to construct the fallout meter. At the end of the instructions are extra patterns on 4 unnumbered pages. The reader is urged to use these extra patterns to make KFM's in normal peacetime and to keep the complete instructions intact for use during a recognized crisis period.

The thorium fuel cycle is a nuclear fuel cycle that uses the naturally abundant isotope of thorium, 232Th, as the fertile material which is transmuted into the fissile artificial uranium isotope 233U which is the nuclear fuel. However, unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as 231Th), and these are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Thus, some fissile material or other neutron source must be supplied to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fueled reactor, 232Th will absorb neutrons eventually to produce 233U, which is similar to the process in uranium-fueled reactors whereby fertile 238U absorbs neutrons to form fissile 239Pu.

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that the crisis at a Japanese nuclear plant after the country's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami have prompted him to halt Venezuela's plans to develop nuclear energy.

Chavez announced last year that his government was carrying out initial studies to start a nuclear energy program.

Russia's government had agreed to help Venezuela build a reactor last year during a visit to Moscow by Chavez. But Chavez said watching events unfold in Japan has prompted him to reconsider.

I began my career as a journalist by looking deeply into the rabbit-hole of nuclear power from 1993 to 2000. I visited the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Public Document Rooms -- which have since been closed in many places -- where I read thousands of microfilms and scanned microfiche records and excavated document after document in search of truth. I visited nuke plants in New England and industry conferences. I interviewed officials and I attended the most boring and sometimes secretive public meetings with the most stifling and unimaginative bureaucrats and with engineers (like me) so dry they squeaked. And then I reported on regulatory corruption, technical failures, undemocratic initiatives to betray the public trust, and the accumulating radiation and nuclear poisons -- and the many ways that the mass media supported and perpetuated the mythology.

Amongst the most troubling and most deeply underplayed questions of the entire crisis concern the Fukushima Spent Fuel Pools. These basin are packed with tons of irradiated fuel rods that need to be cooled. One of the major postulated accident scenarios involves a Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) to the reactor core, but a LOCA event can also occur with a spent fuel pool. It has. Fires and explosions in Japan. The Spent Fuel Pools at the six Fukushima reactors are NOT inside primary containment. They are exposed. Burning. About to burn.

Reactors No. 4, 5, and 6 at Fukushima were shutdown when the earthquake struck. After the water drained and the spent fuel became exposed, the pool at reactor No. 4 caught fire, and continues to burn, as of Thursday March 17, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the environment. The status of the other six spent fuel pools at Fukushima is unknown. A courageous U.S. journalist Rachel Maddow explored the spent fuel pool issue with a former government official. The most important, critical point made by Princeton professor Frank Von Hippel occurs at minute 14:19 -- where Rachel Maddow talks over him: these are LONG-LIFE RADIONUCLIDES being emitted from the spent fuel pool(s). Isotopes of cesium: Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years and will be around and hot for decades.

How much disaster are we talking about? The atomic bomb that exploded at Hiroshima created about 2000 curies of radioactivity. The spent fuel pools at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (U.S.) are said to hold about 75 million curies. There are six spent fuel pools at Fukushima, but the numbers of tons of fuel rods in each have not been made public.

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) did the math: If Fukushima's Reactor No. 4 operated for 35 years and produced 30 tons of irradiated fuel per year and each ton is equivalent to 24 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, then each fuel pool could contain on the order of 24,000 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, if all the produced irradiated fuel remains in the fuel pool.

Nuclear stupidity No. 1: the Fukushima reactor buildings are square (not circular) and had to absorb the force of the tsunami wave straight on. Stupidity No. 2: six reactors clustered too close together. Stupidity No. 3: no shoreline protection against a tsunami. Stupidity No. 4: reactors sited on earthquake faults. Stupidity No. 5: assumptions and calculations proving that the reactor, prior to its construction, could withstand anything that nature threw at it. Stupidity No. 6: it didn't begin in Japan: the industry, with all its corruptions, false assumptions and technological hubris, was born in secrecy in the United States of America.

Stupidity No. 125: spent fuel pools are packed too tightly, as is well-established by industry documents, for economic reasons, discarding safety concerns. Stupidity No. 458: the Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima are suspended up high inside the reactor buildings secondary containment -- the same buildings whose roofs are blowing off! Are we to believe that the massive explosions that were captured on film, and others that were not, did not damage these elevated time bombs?

How many stupidities do we need to admit before we admit that it can happen in the United States and Europe and Canada too? Imagine those courageous Japanese nuclear workers at Fukushima -- sacrificing their lives! -- trying to save their families, Japan and the rest of us from our unprecedented stupidity!

THE CLEAN AND GREEN PROPAGANDA

Of course, technology gurus and corporate executives and financial consultants are hysterical, claiming there were no deaths from Three Mile Island and that deaths at Chernobyl are exaggerated by the mass media. These claims are false. The new book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment provides irrefutable evidence of massive loss of life.

"The book is solidly based -- on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports -- some 5,000 in al," says journalist Karl Grossman. "It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow."

James Lovelock, author of the renowned GAIA Hypothesis, is a celebrated environmentalist for nuclear energy peddling nuclear power as a clean, green, renewable energy source of the future. However, Lovelock has a long history working for NASA -- the outer-space division of the Pentagon -- and is deeply enmeshed in the western epistemological framework.

Commenting on Japan's nuclear crisis, Lovelock said that people were 'prejudiced' against nuclear power unreasonably. "It is very safe," he said. Chernobyl, for instance, was "an idiotic mess-up that could only have occurred in the Soviet Union", and according to UN estimates had killed only about 56 people. More people are routinely killed in oil refineries and coal mines, he pointed out."

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"The first 'type' of radioactive material is the uranium in the fuel rods," wrote Dr. Oehmen, "plus the intermediate radioactive elements that the uranium splits into, also inside the fuel rod (Cesium and Iodine). There is a second type of radioactive material created, outside the fuel rods. The big main difference up front: Those radioactive materials have a very short half-life, that means that they decay very fast and split into non-radioactive materials. By fast I mean seconds. So if these radioactive materials are released into the environment, yes, radioactivity was released, but no, it is not dangerous, at all. Why? By the time you spelled "R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E", they will be harmless, because they will have split up into non radioactive elements..."

It takes about five seconds to spell R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E and it takes about the same amount of time to read a chart (below) which shows the actual lifetimes and half-lives of radioisotopes that people need to be concerned about today.

Not only does Dr. Oehmen intentionally misinform people about the inherent design flaws and potential failures of nuclear reactors and subsystems, but he knowingly disinforms about the potential for serious health consequences and the radioactive contaminants that are typically released during a nuclear power accident. While millions of people in Japan are suffering the personal psychological terror of a possible nuclear holocaust, the fears and horrors of life and death from a natural disaster, starvation and thirst, and radioactive poisoning. Dr. Joseph Oehmen -- safe in Boston Massachusetts -- has been been boasting about his blog post -- equally popular with people who hate it and love it -- which spread like a virus on the Internet.

During nuclear fission, the uranium from the fuel rods splits into many radioactive fission products that can then escape during a nuclear power 'event'. These include dangerous Noble Gases (xenon and krypton); Hallogens (including iodines and bromines); Alkali Metals (including cesium 137); Alkaline earths (including barium 133 and strontium 90) and the elements Tellurium and Ruthenium. Some fissionable elements decay rapidly and are inconsequential during releases, but some decay into other, more deadly nuclides. The most dangerous nuclides have half-lives in days (I-131 = 8 days), years (Cs-137 = 30 years) or centuries (Pu-239 = 24,000 years). Half-life is the time it takes for one-half of the material to decay -- lest we forget that the other half is still present.

All of these fissionable products are potentially released and they have varying degrees of half-lives, mobility, migration and toxicity depending on factors like atmospheric conditions, temperature of the reactor core and operating capacity (megawatts) at shutdown, and the presence of coolants. The most dangerous of these are iodine 131 (I-131), cesium 137 (Cs-137), strontium 90 (Sr-90), cobalt 60 (Co-60) and plutonium 239 (Pu-239). All of these negatively affect the human body and all of these have been released in nuclear power 'accidents', during venting of radioactive steam or flushing of radioactive water, and other 'events'. Another deadly isotope which seems to consistently 'escape' from nuclear power sites is cobalt 60 (Co-60), half-life 5.2 years. Co-60 accumulates and migrates through steam generator tubes and other secondary coolant processes, in core shrouds and reactor pressure vessels, and many of the other components of nuclear reactors whose histories of failures are thoroughly documented.

Is radiation leaking in Japan? Yes and no. The term 'leak' suggests air squeaking out of a balloon. In Japan we have leaks, here and there, but we also have explosions, fires and other phenomena that create massive radioactive emissions. To say 'leak' is to downplay what is happening. The balloons in Japan have burst: primary containment has been breached at Reactor No. 3 and at least one spent fuel pool is burning up. With the walls blown out and roof blown off, it seems at least one other spent fuel pool is gone or going.

Nuclear advocates deride and dismiss public ignorance about radionuclides like, for example, the noble gases. Nuclear advocates frequently state that both xenon and krypton decay and disappear in a matter of seconds or minutes. What they don't tell us is that these isotopes decay into daughter isotopes that are extremely deadly emitters. Many credible physicians, scientists and other nuclear experts -- free of the self-interests of nuclear profits, academic sponsorship or career advancement -- have outlined the absence of epidemiological studies of certain radionuclides emitted or flushed at nuclear reactors. Dr. Helen Caldicott has elaborated the detrimental health effects of the noble gases xenon (Xe) and krypton (Kr), and she notes that these have appearance hundreds of miles from reactors believed to have emitted them.

• Xenon 137, with a half-life of 3.9 minutes, converts almost immediately to the notoriously dangerous cesium 137 with a half-life of thirty years.• Krypton 90, half-life of 33 seconds, decays to rubidium 90, half-life of 2.9 minutes, then to the medically toxic strontium 90, half-life of twenty-eight years.• Xenon 135 decays to cesium 135 with an incredibly long half-life of 3 million years.• Large amounts of xenon 133 are released at operating reactors, and although it has a relatively short half-life of 5.3 days, it remains radioactive for 106 days.• Krypton 85, which has a half-life of 10.4 years, is a powerful gamma radiation emitter.• Argon 39 has a 265-year half-life.

"Other dangerous noble gases include xenon 141,143 and 144, which decay to cerium 141,143 and 144," Dr. Helen Caldicott reports in Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. "According to the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP Report No. 60) these three cerium isotopes,which are beta emitters,are abundant products of nuclear fission reactions and have moderately long half-lives. They bio-concentrate in the food chain, and they irradiate the lung, liver, skeleton, and gastrointestinal tract, where they act as potent carcinogens."

On March 14 Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) outlined the risks from Japan. Iodine 131 migrates in air and is known for causing thyroid cancers, especially in children. Strontium 90 causes different cancers. Cesium 137 concetrates in bone and causes leukemia. Microscopic particles of plutonium 239 cause lung cancer if inhaled and Pu-239 kills instantly in any sizeble dose. Areas contaminated by plutonium will have to be abandoned -- as happened at Chernobyl.

"Since 2010, Fukushima Daiichi Unit-3 reactor had been using mixed-oxide fuel (also called plutonium fuel or MOX)," PSR reported, in Japan's Nuclear Crises Worsens, "which is even more dangerous to the public than a severe accident with uranium fuel. Plutonium fuel contains plutonium and other very toxic actinides that would increase the number of resulting cancers. Current reports say that this fuel has been exposed to air."

Here is a simultaneous catastrophe beyond human comprehension: At least six nuclear reactors in various states of collapse, out-of-control, and in partial meltdown, and at least one even more deadly spent fuel pool overheating and burning, amidst the apocalypse from the original Richter 9.0 earthquake, the Richter 5.0 and 6.0 aftershocks, the Tsunami, the massive death toll, the lack of emergency vehicles and spreading radioactivity, the fires, the melting Spent Fuel Pools -- they are not "screening" radioactive releases which, in any case, are now uncontrolled.

With the current news that nuclear fallout radiation from Japan has hit the US the US Government has put real time radiation monitoring data online.

Per the usual, just like with the BP spill when the Government puts information online they bury it so deep it's very hard to find. Then once you do find what you are looking for it takes a month worth of Sundays to get through it all.

So I made an application that generates thumbnails of all of the real time Japan nuclear radiation monitoring data for the major US west coast cities every three hours 15 minutes and posts them right here.

Update: Looks like this is up just in time as independent radiation monitoring has just gone offline. Keep in mind though this is Government supplied/censored data.

The Daiichi complex in Fukushima, Japan ... had a total of 1760 metric tons of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site last year, according to a presentation by its owners, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). The most damaged Daiichi reactor, number 3, contains about 90 tons of fuel, and the storage pool above reactor 4, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) Gregory Jaczko reported yesterday had lost its cooling water, contains 135 tons of spent fuel. The amount of fuel lost in the core melt at Three Mile Island in 1979 was about 30 tons; the Chernobyl reactors had about 180 tons when the accident occurred in 1986.

Specifically, Tepco very recentlytransferred many more radioactive spent fuel rods into the storage pools. According to Associated Press, there were - at the time of the earthquake and tsunami - 3,400 tons of fuel in seven spent fuel pools plus 877 tons of active fuel in the cores of the reactors.

That totals 4,277tons of nuclear fuel at Fukushima.

Which means that there is almost 24 times more nuclear fuel at Fukushima than Chernobyl.

In principle, using the Atomic Energy Control Board’s (AECB) regulatory limits, we can calculate that 0.1 micrograms of plutonium can overdose one person while noting that maximum safe exposure limits is placed at 0.56 micrograms maximum full body exposure and 0.25 micrograms for lung exposure. “Experiments with beagle dogs suggest that about 27 millionths of a gram of insoluble plutonium would be sufficient to cause lung cancer in an adult human being with virtual certainty, with significant risks probably associated with far lower doses,” report International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. According to the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR) 0.1 grams would overdose one million people, one gram, ten million people, 100 grams, one billion people and 600 grams, six billion people.

“A rapid release of one kilogram of plutonium at ground level in dispersible, inhalable form would cause a public health emergency of the first magnitude. Plutonium air concentrations could be on the order of hundreds of micrograms per cubic meter of air at one kilometer from the release site. Individuals breathing this air would inhale enough plutonium to cause cancer with certainty within minutes,” said Dr. Edwin S. Lyman of the Nuclear Control Institute. This is the nightmare of nightmares. There is an incredible amount of plutonium in this plant that could very well put us all in supercritical danger.

350 tons of uranium is equal toabout a kilogram of plutonium.Dr. Chris Busby

The Pentagon has misled the world with claims that its DU is safe. They have lied about depleted uranium regardless of how many of their own soldiers become ill and die from it and from the toxic vaccines they administer in mega doses before troops are deployed into war theaters. The Pentagon has maintained that DU shells are safe because they contain only mildly radioactive uranium when in reality depleted uranium also contains small amounts of plutonium and other highly radioactive elements. Despite the authorities’ attempts at concealment, the truth is out.

According to Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, “DU dust-like particles can enter human bodies, and once taken into the body, they will become tens of millions times more hazardous. Newly released data indicate that low-level radiation is more likely to cause biochemical abnormalities than intensive high-level radiation. It is wrong to make light of the hazard of low-level radiation.”

After the “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq in 2003, very fine particles of depleted uranium were captured with larger sand and dust particles in filters in Britain. These particles had traveled in 7-9 days from Iraqi battlefields as far as 2400 miles away. The radiation measured in the atmosphere quadrupled within a few weeks after the beginning of the 2003 campaign, and at one of the five monitoring locations, the levels required two official alerts to the British Environment Agency.

Within nine days of the start of the Iraq war on March 19, 2003,higher levels of uranium were picked up on five sites in Berkshire.London Times

The Ministry of Defense refused to acknowledge the possibility of any connection between the use of atomic weaponry in Iraq and these readings in England, saying the uranium was of a “natural origin” and there was no evidence that depleted uranium had reached Britain from Iraq.

Infowars analysis: In addition to under reporting the fires at Fukushima, the Japanese government has not told the people about the ominous fact that the nuclear plant site is a hellish repository where a staggering number of spent fuel rods have accumulated for 40 years.

A contributor to the Occupational and Environmental Medicine list who once worked on nuclear waste issues provided additional information about Fukushima’s spent fuel rod assemblies, according to a post on the FDL website.

“NIRS has a Nov 2010 powerpoint from Tokyo Electric Power Company (in english) detailing the modes and quantities of spent fuel stored at the Fukushima Daiichi plant where containment buildings #1 and #3 have exploded,” he wrote on March 14.

The Powerpoint is entitled Integrity Inspection of Dry Storage Casks and Spent Fuels at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and can be read in full here. The document adds a new and frightening dimension to the unfolding disaster.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant has seven pools dedicated to spent fuel rods. These are located at the top of six reactor buildings – or were until explosions and fires ravaged the plant. On the ground level there is a common pool in a separate building that was critical damaged by the tsunami. Each reactor building pool holds 3,450 fuel rod assemblies and the common pool holds 6,291 fuel rod assemblies. Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. In short, the Fukushima Daiichi plant contains over 600,000 spent fuel rods – a massive amount of radiation that will soon be released into the atmosphere.

It should be obvious by now that the authorities in Japan are lying about the effort to contain the situation in order to mollify the public. It is highly likely there are no workers on the site attempting to contain the disaster.

Earlier today, a report was issued indicating that over 70% of these spent fuel rods are now damaged – in other words, they are emitting radiation or will soon. The disclosure reveals that authorities in Japan – who have consistently played down the danger and issued conflicting information – are guilty of criminal behavior and endangering the lives of countless people.

On Tuesday, it was finally admitted that meltdowns of the No. 1 and No. 2 reactor cores are responsible for the release of a massive amount of radiation.

After reporting that a fire at the No. 4 reactor was contained, the media is reporting this evening that it has resumed. The media predictably does not bother to point out why the fire is uncontainable – the fuel rods are no longer submerged in water and are exposed to the atmosphere and that is why they are burning and cannot be extinguished.

It cannot be stressed enough that the situation at Fukushima represents the greatest environmental disaster in the history of humanity, far more dangerous that Chernobyl, and the government of that country is responsible.

—

Perhaps the most underreported and deadliest aspect of the three explosions and numerous fires to hit the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor since Saturday is the fact that highly radioactive spent fuel rods which are stored outside of the active nuclear rod containment facility are likely to have been massively compromised by the blasts, an elevation in the crisis that would represent “Chernobyl on steroids,” according to nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen.

As you can see from the NPR graphic below, the spent fuel rods are stored outside of the active nuclear rod containment casing and close to the roof of the reactor complex. Video from Saturday’s explosion and subsequent images clearly indicate that the spent fuel rods at Fukushima unit number one could easily have been compromised by the blast.

According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, the failure to maintain pools of water that keep the 20 years worth of spent fuel rods cool could cause “catastrophic fires” and turn the crisis into “Chernobyl on steroids.”

The BBC is now reporting that “spent fuel rods in reactors five and six are also now believed to be heating up,” with a new fire at reactor 4, where more spent rods are stored, causing smoke to pour from the facility.

... that shows the cooling tank for the spent fuel rods located idiotically over the actual reactor?

The fact that Wikipedia is deleting these diagrams suggests that indeed there is massive PR and propaganda effort to downplay this disaster and to de-emphasise General Electric's role in the Fukushima reactor complex.

The cloud has been progressively thinning as it heads eastwards around the northern hemisphere at high altitude and will reach mainland Europe on Wednesday or Thursday, it said, citing a computer model jointly compiled with the French weather service, Meteo France.

BBC at 18:41: The cloud plume from Fukushima has now reached the western Atlantic, but radioactivity is likely to be “extremely low” with no impact on health or the environment, France’s Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) says, according to the AFP news agency.

Reporting from Los Angeles, Kesennuma and Tokyo—U.S. government nuclear experts believe a spent fuel pool at Japan's crippled Fukushima reactor complex has a breach in the wall or floor, a situation that creates a major obstacle to refilling the pool with cooling water and keeping dangerous levels of radiation from escaping.

That assessment by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials is based on the sequence of events since the earthquake and information provided by key American contractors who were in the plant at the time, said government officials familiar with the evaluation. It was compelling evidence, they said, that the wall of the No. 4 reactor pool has a significant hole or crack.

Webmaster's Commentary:

No mention of the cooling pools already known to be totally destroyed at two other reactors, or the pools at reactors 5 and 6 which are heating up.

The Japan Times reports the Pentagon will send an unmanned Global Hawk high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft over the deteriorating Fukushima nuclear complex today.

“Photographs taken by the plane equipped with infrared sensors could provide a useful clue to what is occurring inside the reactor buildings, around which high-level radiation has been detected,” the news source reports.

The flight is basically unnecessary and represents PR spin. Both the Pentagon and the Japanese government know full well the severity of the situation at the Fukushima plant and they are not releasing this information to either the Japanese or American people.

The Pentagon is responsible for developing nuclear technology and has particle detectors, also known as radiation detectors, positioned around the world. The USS George Washington and USS Ronald Reagan, both now parked off Japan, are outfitted with radiation detection technology.

In addition, the radiation can be tracked by the U.S. Air Force’s Constant Phoenix WC-135 jets, which are designed to monitor airborne fallout from nuclear weapons tests.

Constant Phoenix technology was used after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine to sample the air over the Atlantic and was also used to detect seismic events associated with North Korea’s claim of a nuclear test in October 2006 and again in May 2009, the Pentagon told Alan Boyle of MSNBC.

Japan's science ministry says relatively high radiation levels have been detected on 2 consecutive days about 30 kilometers northwest of the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The radiation measured 170 microsieverts per hour on Thursday and 150 microsieverts on Friday.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says the government will take appropriate measures if this level of contamination continues in the area for a long period. But he says this would be unlikely.

Radiation was measured for 2 hours from 10AM on Friday at 18 spots in areas 30 to 60 kilometers from the plant in Fukushima Prefecture.

The highest reading of 150 microsieverts per hour was detected at around 1:30 PM local time, about 30 kilometers northwest of the plant. The location is within the zone where residents have been instructed to stay indoors.

Readings of 170 microsieverts were recorded at the same location at 2 PM on the previous day, Thursday.

Experts say exposure to this amount of radiation for 6 to 7 hours would result in absorption of the maximum level considered safe for one year.

The ministry also observed radiation levels of 0.5 to 52 microsieverts per hour at other observation points within a 30 to 60 kilometer radius of the plant. It says these levels are all higher than normal, but not an immediate threat to health.

The government has evacuated residents living within a 20 kilometer radius of the plant, and instructed those in a 20 to 30 kilometer radius to stay indoors.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Webmaster's Commentary:

After three months, this would match the radiation exposure that triggered permanent relocation at Chernobyl, 350 mSv/lifetime.

March 16, 2011 (San Diego) 12:30 a.m. -- A radiation map on the U.S. Environmental Protection Service shows radiation levels at measuring stations across the United States. There is a disturbing pattern showing gamma radiation levels along the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii at two to ten times levels on the East Coast, with midwest states in mid-ranges:

Attempts to cool down a spent fuel storage pool at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been conducted on 2 fronts, with more attempts planned.

Webmaster's Commentary:

More attempts means it is not working all that well, and of course, the run-off goes into the Pacific ocean. So in addition to monitoring the air, we need to monitor seas water and Pacific food stocks.

A nuclear crisis at the quake-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant deepened Tuesday as fresh explosions occurred at the site and its operator said water in a pool storing spent nuclear fuel rods may be boiling, an ominous sign for the release of high-level radioactive materials from the fuel.

Japan was today rallying behind the anonymous nuclear emergency workers at the stricken Fukushima power plant - as heartbreaking details of their plight emerged.

The 180 workers face soaring radiation levels as they make ever more desperate attempts to stop over-heating reactors and spent fuel rods leaking more radiation into the atmosphere.

Some experts have speculated that they may be engaged in a suicide mission - or at least could suffer serious health problems for the rest of their lives - as helicopters and police riot control trucks are used to dump water on the reactors and exposed nuclear fuel storage pools.

Japanese engineers conceded on Friday that burying a crippled nuclear plant in sand and concrete may be a last resort to prevent a catastrophic radiation release, the method used to seal huge leakages from Chernobyl in 1986.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Covering over the reactor will probably look good on the TV news, but the cover at Chernobyl is still leaking all these years later and the countryside around the power station still evacuated. In the case of Fukushima, the cover may even be less effective. Fukushima is at the shore of the ocean. A sand and concrete cover will not prevent radioactive leaching into the Pacific Ocean through the undersea. Were there to be a real China Syndrome, rough the bottom of the reactor building and into the soil. hitting the water table would generate a huge steam explosion and blast the entire reactor contents, including the spent fuel rods stored over the reactors, into the atmosphere and ocean. As structures melt and the slag concentrates into pools at the bottom of the buildings, fission will start again and the heat will grow.

Frankly, I think covering over the building is of little value over and above looking like they are doing something to solve this unsolvable problem.

Fukushima reactors will have to be entombed — “Radioactive and deadly for thousands of years”

25 years after Russia’s disaster, experts are still working to entomb the deadly reactor that still releases radioactivity

… In Japan, the Fukushima complex will also have to be entombed, and the radiation levels will make that very difficult.

“These reactors are never going to be used again,” said James Acton, of the Carnegie Endowment’s Nuclear Policy Program. “They’re going to have to be entombed for a significant length of time before anything’s able to be done about them.”

And in Japan, officials are dealing not with just one rogue reactor, but six of them. …

That still unfinished containment dome at Chernobyl is only projected to last 100 years. And Chernobyl, like the Japanese plant at Fukushima, will remain radioactive — and deadly — for thousands of years.

Spinach with radioactive iodine 27 times more than the government-regulated limit was found in the city of Hitachi in Ibaraki Prefecture, more than 100 kilometers south of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, but the radiation levels do not affect human health, local authorities said Sunday.

A farmer weeds a spinach field in Ibaragi.

In 1 kilogram of spinach grown in open air in the city, 54,000 becquerels of iodine was detected, exceeding the 2,000 becquerel limit set by the government's preliminary regulation under the food sanitation law, the Ibaraki prefectural government said.

The produce came from Ibaraki prefecture in the northeast, where radiation was found in spinach grown up to 75 miles (120 kilometers) from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Another bin of spinach—labeled as being from Chiba prefecture, west of Tokyo—was sold out.

"It's a little hard to say this, but I won't buy vegetables from Fukushima and that area," said shopper Yukihiro Sato, 75.

Feds admit radioactive xenon-133 from Fukushima detected TWO days ago in Washington State

U.S. officials detected the presence of a radioactive isotope in California on Friday that appeared to come from the Fukushima nuclear-power plant in Japan…

U.S. officials say the levels are consistent with their expectations and pose no risk to human health.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department said in a statement a radiation monitor in Sacramento, Calif., detected minuscule quantities of the radioactive isotope xenon-133. The readings validated similar ones from March 16 and 17 taken from monitors in Washington state, they said. …

Edward Morse, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, added that it will take huge amounts of water to compensate for the cracks in the containment pools that were uncovered by U.S. surveillance aircraft on Friday.

Japan's nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power station showed no signs of abating Wednesday, five days after a mega earthquake crippled it, with the focus shifting to how to address the possible overheating of pools that store spent fuel rods at the already troubled No. 3 and No. 4 reactors.

What appeared to be smoke coming from the No. 3 reactor in the morning led the top government spokesman to point to the possibility of damage to the reactor's steel containment vessel, but it became more likely later in the day that the smoke was radioactive steam coming from the No. 3 reactor's spent fuel pool.

Webmaster's Commentary:

So the fact that the actual containment might still be intact is more or less irrelevant.

It is the spent fuel rods that are the real danger. There is potentially far more radioactive material in those rods, already outside containment, than within the reactors themselves. And while only three reactor cores are damaged, all six of the cooling pools are in varying degrees of trouble. The status of the 7th "common" pool is not on this chart.

Top US officials have testified before congress today that situation in Japan has a reached a catastrophe of proportions on par with Chernobyl. Both the Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Gregory B. Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave dire testimony before the The House Energy and Commerce committee.

At this point both the primary and secondary containment vessels at the Fukushima nuclear reactor #4 are breached. To make matters worse radiation readings taken by the US indicate that the cooling pond is empty indicating which means the fuel rods are in a state of complete meltdown with no cooling to counteract the meltdown in progress.

Officials are now reporting extremely high levels or radiation are now being released. Spent fuel rods are exposed and this disaster has taken a turn for the worse.

Official: Spent fuel rods exposed, heightening concerns

Tokyo (CNN) — Spent fuel rods in Unit 4 of Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have been exposed, resulting in the emission of “extremely high” levels of radiation, the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday.

It is somewhat understandable that the Japanese government and the mainstream media do not want to panic the public, but the reality is that people need the truth about what is going on.

Unfortunately, it is not likely that the Japanese government or the mainstream media are going to "change their stripes" overnight, so in order to try to get an idea of what is really going on we need to look at the clues.

Sometimes it is much more important to watch what people are doing rather than what they are saying.

For example, a significant number of foreign governments are now evacuating personnel from Tokyo.

Why would they be evacuating if there was no threat?

Posted below are 27 signs that the nuclear crisis in Japan is much worse than either the mainstream media or the Japanese government have been telling us. When you take all of these clues and you put them together it really does paint a frightening picture....

#1 Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan is urging all people living within 30 kilometers of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility to stay indoors.

#9 According to the World Nuclear Association, exposure to over 100 millisieverts of radiation a year can lead to cancer. At this point the level of radiation being measured right outside the number 4 reactor at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex is 400 millisieverts per hour.

#10 A U.S. Navy crew that was assisting in relief efforts was exposed to a month’s worth of nuclear radiation in just a single hour.

#11 According to the U.S. Navy, low levels of radiation have been detected at their bases in Yokosuka and Atsugi.

#23 Physicist Frank von Hippel recently told the New York Times the following about this disaster: "It’s way past Three Mile Island already".

#24 The president of France's nuclear safety authority says that this crisis is now almost as bad as Chernobyl was....

"It's clear we are at Level 6, that's to say we're at a level in between what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl."

#25 There have been reports of extremely high radiation at another nuclear facility in Japan. It has been reported that at the Onagawa nuclear plant radiation that is 700 times the normal level was detected at one point.

#26 One anonymous senior nuclear industry executive told The Times Of India that Japanese power industry managers are "basically in a full-scale panic" and that "they don't know what to do".

#27 It is also being reported that there were over 600,000 spent fuel rods stored at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. Most of these rods were apparently stored near the top of the 6 reactor buildings. There have already been major explosions at three of those buildings. It is now feared that there is now nothing to prevent many of these spent fuel rods from releasing radiation into the atmosphere. That is really, really bad news.

Webmaster's Commentary:

28. President Obama is reassuring us all that we are safe from radiation, while he and his family are in South America.

Japan's nuclear safety agency raised the severity rating of the country's nuclear crisis Friday from Level 4 to Level 5 on a seven-level international scale, putting it on par with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.

Officials admit they may have to bury reactors under concrete - as happened at Chernobyl

Government says it was overwhelmed by the scale of twin disasters

Japanese upgrade accident from level four to five - the same as Three Mile Island

We will rebuild from scratch says Japanese prime minister

Particles spewed from wrecked Fukushima power station arrive in California

Military trucks tackle reactors with tons of water for second day

The boss of the company behind the devastated Japanese nuclear reactor today broke down in tears - as his country finally acknowledged the radiation spewing from the over-heating reactors and fuel rods was enough to kill some citizens.

Radiation is streaming into the atmosphere from the used uranium rods at reactor number four, after a 45ft-deep storage pool designed to keep them stable boiled dry in a fire.

And some of the radioactive material could reach Britain within a fortnight, according to experts.

However they say it will not be dangerous when it reaches our shores while low levels of radiation have already hit Southern California.

Scroll down for video

Exposed: this shots shows a gaping hole in the building of reactor number four. The green crane, circled, is normally used to move spent fuel rods into a 45ft deep storage pond, just out of shot. But the pool has now boiled dry and the spent rods are heating up and releasing radiation.

'They (reactors) are kind of like a coffee maker. If you leave it on the heat, they boil dry and then they crack,' he said.

'Putting concrete on that wouldn't help keep your coffee maker safe. But eventually, yes, you could build a concrete shield and be done with it.'

And Yukiya Amano, the head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency said workers were in a 'race against the clock' to cool the reactor.

Attempts to quell the overheating plant with waterbombs from helicopters yesterday failed and despite the army pelting the site with water cannon, radiation levels rose higher.

Engineers are also working to restore power to the coolant pumping system knocked out by the tsunami.

Four of six nuclear reactors at the site have been hit by explosions and fires which have sent clouds of low-level radiation into the air.

However, footage suggested much of the 2,000 gallons of water missed its target.

Later, six fire engines and a water cannon tried to spray the building with 9,000 gallons of water from high pressure hoses. However, radiation levels within the plant rose from 3,700 millisieverts to 4,000 millisieverts an hour immediately afterwards.

People exposed to such doses will suffer radiation sickness and many will die. Today Tokyo Electric Power, which owns the plant, will try to restart the reactor's cooling systems after workers connected a half mile long power cable from the national grid to Reactor 2.

The chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave a significantly bleaker appraisal of the threat posed by Japan’s nuclear crisis than the Japanese government, saying on Wednesday that the damage at one crippled reactor was much more serious than Japanese officials had acknowledged and advising to Americans to evacuate a wider area around the plant than the perimeter established by Japan.

The operator of the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant says the outside power lines to the cooling systems of the reactor might be connected as early as Friday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company disclosed this at a news conference on Thursday night.

The 3 reactors at the plant lost cooling capabilities due to a power outage and failure of emergency power generators after the quake and tsunami.

The firm began to set up power lines from the high-voltage cables near the plant on Thursday, saying a large amount of electricity is needed to recover the reactor cooling systems.

The company says the new power lines will be connected to a makeshift transformer, and then to the cooling system of the No.2 reactor. They say the system seems to have less damage than the other reactors.

The company originally planned to work on the power line on Thursday, but the high radiation levels and lengthy water-injecting operations forced a delay.

In a sign of desperation, the police will try to cool spent nuclear fuel at one of the facility's reactors with water cannon, normally used to quell riots.

Early in the day, another fire broke out at the earthquake-crippled facility, which has sent low levels of radiation wafting into Tokyo in the past 24 hours, triggering fear in the capital and international alarm.

High radiation levels prevented a helicopter from flying to the site to drop water into the No. 3 reactor to try to cool its fuel rods. The unit's roof was damaged by an earlier explosion and steam was seen rising there earlier in the day.

The plant operator described No. 3 as the "priority". No more information was available, but that reactor is the only one at Daiichi which uses plutonium in its fuel mix.

The situation at No. 4 reactor, where the fire broke out, was "not so good", the plant operator added, while water was being poured into reactors No. 5 and 6, indicating the entire six-reactor facility was now at risk of overheating.

Nuclear experts said the solutions being proposed to quell radiation leaks at the complex were last-ditch efforts to stem what could well be remembered as one of the world's worst industrial disasters.

Panic over the economic impact of last Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami knocked $620 billion off Japan's stock market over the first two days of this week, but the Nikkei index rebounded on Wednesday to end up 5.68 percent.

Scores of flights to Japan have been halted or rerouted and air travellers are avoiding Tokyo for fear of radiation. On Wednesday, both France and Australia urged their nationals in Japan to leave the country as authorities grappled with the world's most serious nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986.

In a demonstration of the qualms about nuclear power that the crisis has triggered around the globe, China announced that it was suspending approvals for planned plants and would launch a comprehensive safety check of facilities.

China has about two dozen reactors under construction and plans to increase nuclear electricity generation about seven-fold over the next 10 years.

In Japan, the plight of hundreds of thousands left homeless by the earthquake and devastating tsunami that followed worsened overnight following a cold snap that brought snow to some of the worst-affected areas.

Supplies of water and heating oil are low at evacuation centres, where many survivors wait bundled in blankets.

"It's cold today so many people have fallen ill, getting diarrhea and other symptoms," said Takanori Watanabe, a Red Cross doctor in Otsuchi, a low-lying town where more than half the 17,000 residents are still missing.

While the official death toll stands at around 4,000, thousands are listed as missing and the number of dead is expected to rise.

At its worst, radiation in Tokyo reached 0.809 microsieverts per hour on Tuesday -- 10 times below what a person would receive if exposed to a dental x-ray. For Wednesday, radiation levels were barely above average.

But many Tokyo residents stayed indoors. Usually busy streets were nearly deserted. Many shops and offices were closed.

Winds over the plant blew out towards the Pacific Ocean on on Wednesday.

There have been hundreds of aftershocks and more than two dozen were greater than magnitude 6, the size of the earthquake that severely damaged Christchurch, New Zealand, last month -- powerful enough to sway buildings in Tokyo.

About 850,000 households in the north were still without electricity in near-freezing weather, Tohuku Electric Power Co. said, and the government said at least 1.5 million households lack running water. Tens of thousands of people were missing.

OSLO (Reuters) - In the worst case, any radioactive cloud from Japan's damaged nuclear plant is likely to be limited to the densely populated nation -- unlike the wider fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, experts say.

"In the worst case, a radioactive cloud would not go that far up in the atmosphere," said Jan Beranek, head of environmental group Greenpeace's International Nuclear Campaign.

"That is good news for the world, but bad news for Japan."

"Maybe we have to pray," he said, adding that a wind blowing any nuclear fallout east into the Pacific would limit any damage for Japan's 127 million population in case of a meltdown or other releases, for instance from spent fuel storage "ponds."

Greenpeace's Beranek said that heavy pollution from cesium could make some areas of Japan near the plant uninhabitable, at least for decades, as happened around Chernobyl. Pflugbeil also said some areas might be off-limits.

Leaks from Fukushima have already spread some radiation from the plant, briefly raising levels in Tokyo to 10 times normal levels, but are far below the level of a catastrophic release that would pose a wide threat to human health, experts say.

Crick at UNSCEAR said that long-term exposure after Chernobyl for people living in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia was about 10 millisieverts, the equivalent of the radiation in one CT scan, a special type of x-ray. People pick up about 2.4 millisieverts a year in background radiation.

An estimated 70 percent of the nuclear fuel rods have been damaged at the troubled No. 1 reactor of the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant and 33 percent at the No. 2 reactor, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday.

The reactors' cores are believed to have partially melted with their cooling functions lost after Friday's magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Fukushima Prefecture and other areas in northeastern and eastern Japan.

Webmaster's Commentary:

And what about those thousands of spent fuel rods loaded into the cooling pools, including the cooling pools right over the reactors themselves! That stuff didn't just vanish.

The situation at the quake-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant in northeastern Japan ''has worsened considerably,'' the Institute for Science and International Security said in a statement released Tuesday.

Referring to fresh explosions that occurred earlier in the day at the site and problems in a pool storing spent nuclear fuel rods, the Washington-based think tank said, ''This accident can no longer be viewed as a level 4 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Events scale that ranks events from 1 to 7.''

Noting that a level 4 incident involves ''only local radiological consequences,'' it said the ongoing crisis is ''now closer to a level 6, and it may unfortunately reach a level 7'' -- a worst case scenario with extensive health and environmental consequences.

Another fire broke out on Wednesday at an earthquake-crippled Japanese nuclear plant that has sent low levels of radiation wafting into Tokyo and triggered international alarm, suggesting that the crisis may be slipping out of control.

Academics and nuclear experts agree that the solutions being proposed to contain damage to the Daiichi reactors at Fukushima, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, are last-ditch efforts to stem what could well be remembered as one of the world's worst industrial disasters.

While public broadcaster NHK said flames were no longer visible at the building housing the No.4 reactor of the plant, Japanese TV pictures showed smoke rising from the facility at mid-morning (1000 local, 0100 GMT).

After the earthquake, nerves are beginning to fray in Japan's capital following the tsunami and nuclear crisis

Justin McCurryGuardian

The dimmed lights in the normally effervescent neighbourhood of Tokyo were eerily appropriate given the mood on Monday, three days into the greatest test of Japan's resilience as a nation since the second world war...

As this schematic shows, in addition to the ground level common spent fuel rod storage at Fukushima, there are tanks inside the roof of each reactor building, holding the spent rods in cooling solutions of Boric acid. Each “reactor top” pool holds 3450 fuel rod assemblies. The common pool holds 6291 fuel rod assemblies. [The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods. This explains why the exlosion at one of the reactors ...

... showed the yellow-brown color of plutonium oxide.

This also explains why the USA was sending "coolant" to Japan; not for the reactors, but for those spent fuel rods tanks!

The explosion Tuesday at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has elevated the situation there to a "serious accident" on a level just below Chernobyl, a French nuclear official said, referring to an international scale that rates the severity of such incidents.

Greed in the nuclear industry and corporate influence over the U.N. watchdog for atomic energy may doom Japan to a spreading nuclear disaster, one of the men brought in to clean up Chernobyl said on Tuesday.

Slamming the Japanese response at Fukushima, Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev accused corporations and the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of willfully ignoring lessons from the world's worst nuclear accident 25 years ago to protect the industry's expansion.

After repeated denials by the Japanese Government insisting that radiation leakage from their nuclear power plants was a non-issue, recent video and reported evidence confirms the horrific truth. Japan is now preparing for the worst case scenario evacuating hundreds of thousands of people. The radioactive release may soon reach Canada and the United States and exposure may last months.

Scroll down to end of article for section on "How Does Potassium Iodide Work?" - Potassium iodide (also called KI) is a salt of stable (not radioactive) iodine. Stable iodine is an important chemical needed by the body to make thyroid hormones. Most of the stable iodine in our bodies comes from the food we eat. KI is stable iodine in a medicine form.

"It is obvious the Japanese are attempting to cover up the deadly seriousness of events unfolding in their country," reported Prisonplanet.com.

As a result of alternative video reports and journalists, the Japanese government is now changing their story, admitting over 300,000 people evacuated and possibly tens of thousands dead.

According to the Washington Post, Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant did not find a way to stabilize overheated reactors and feared the possibility of partial nuclear meltdown, which could potentially cause a further release of radioactive material, Japan's top government spokesman said Sunday. Engineers were having trouble, in particular, with two units at the nuclear facility.

Health Effects

Radiation poisoning is a form of damage to organ and other tissues caused by excessive exposure to ionizing radiation. Radiation exposure can increase the probability of developing several diseases, mainly cancer, tumours, and genetic damage. It is generally associated with acute (a single large) exposure such as that being released from a nuclear meltdown.

The amount of radiation exposure is usually expressed in a unit called millirem (mrem). Radiation doses of more than 5000 mrem/year are considered unsafe, regardless of source. In the United States, the average person is exposed to an effective dose equivalent of approximately 360 mrem (whole-body exposure) per year from all sources.

A radiation dose calculator can approximate values and general averages for typical annual radiaiton exposure. Nuclear technology expert Brad McCarthy stated that "exposure from a nuclear meltdown could fall between 100,000 to 1,000,000 mrem which could cause severe radiation sickness to the people in Japan with increasing likelihood of fatality."

* Radiation leaking directly into the air from stricken Fukushima nuclear plant* Power station has now suffered three reactor explosions and one fire* One reactor core 'exposed to the atmosphere' through crack in containment wall.

Welcome to RadiationNetwork.com, home of the National Radiation Map, depicting environmental radiation levels across the USA, updated in real time every minute. This is the first web site where the average citizen (or anyone in the world) can see what radiation levels are anywhere in the USA at any time.

Radiation reached around 20 times normal levels in the capital Tuesday morning, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said, while offering the assurance this reading posed no immediate risk to human health and that the public should remain calm. Japan Times

The National Academy of Sciences says there is no safe radiation dose: “that it is unlikely that a threshold exists for the induction of cancers..." BEIR VII, 2005

The blaze at No. 4 reactor -- which was not in service at the time of the quake -- was put out, but water in the pool storing spent nuclear fuel may be boiling, causing the water level to drop and potentially exposing the rods, a spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said. MyFoxDetroit

Residents living 20 to 30 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex destroyed by the power loss from the earthquake and tsunami have been urged by Tokyo Electric Power Company officials to take shelter inside because radiation levels have risen to levels "harmful to human health."

Update on March 15, 2011

PLUME UPDATES: Weather forecasts for Fukushima were for snow and wind from the northeast Tuesday evening, blowing southwest toward Tokyo, then shifting and blowing east out to sea. That's important because it shows which direction a possible nuclear cloud might blow. ABC Newsnet5

Admissions that radiation has been released. People living within 20km and 30 km (beyond 12miles) radius are being advised to shelter in place. Those living with 30km radius have been told to stay indoors. The fire is in the spent fuel pool. Unit 4 was not operating at the time of the quake/tsunami.

Radiation levels rising significantly from 1000 microsievert per hour levels now upwards of 400 millisieverts per hour, likely being released from the fire burning from loss of cooling to irradiated fuel stored outside of containment at Unit 4. These levels of radiation will cause physical harm to people, steriliity in males, and reduce white blood cell counts.

People living beyond the current 12 mile evacuated zone being warned to stay indoors. Dust off, remove clothes and scrub down after coming indoors from outside. "Do not hang your laundry outside to dry."

The gung-ho nuclear industry is in deep shock. Just as it and its cheerleader, the International Atomic Energy Agency, were preparing to mark next month's 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident with a series of self-congratulatory statements about the dawning of a safe age of clean atomic power, a series of catastrophic but entirely avoidable accidents take place in not one but three reactors in one of the richest countries of the world.

Posted at noon, March 14: A Japanese utility says fuel rods at a troubled nuclear reactor were once again fully exposed hours after authorities were able to stabilize a similar emergency. Tokyo Electric Power Co. says the exposure happened at Unit 2 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant because a steam vent wouldn't open Monday, causing a sudden drop of water. That reactor and two others at the plant are dangerously overheating and authorities are racing to prevent meltdown. AP

Steel walls all that stand between Japan and nuclear crisis

TOKYO (Reuters) - The key to averting a nuclear disaster at the quake-stricken Fukushima power complex in Japan is ensuring the thick protective steel walls around the reactor cores remain intact.

So far that is the case, authorities say, but experts will be watching closely for any of the following developments:

* Some experts insist a Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster can be averted, despite a second hydrogen explosion on Monday at the complex, which sent a plume of smoke into the air. If they are right, authorities would be expected soon to announce that the reactors had been safely cooled down.

* So long as the thick containment walls shielding the plant's three overheating reactor cores remain intact, a major escape of radioactive clouds could be avoided, even if there was a meltdown of the nuclear fuel rods inside them.

"Everything I've seen says that the containment structure is operating as it's designed to operate. It's keeping the radiation in and it's holding everything in, which is the good news," said Murray Jennex, of San Diego State University.

"This is nothing like a Chernobyl... At Chernobyl (in the Ukraine in 1986) you had no containment structure -- when it blew, it blew everything straight out into the atmosphere."

* Low-level radiation has been detected outside the plant but at very low levels. These levels would need to rise by something like a thousand times before real fears are justified, experts say.

* If the containment wall is breached, the level of radiation would rise sharply.

* At one point on Monday, levels at the stricken plant were around 751 microsieverts, a dosage similar to a stomach x-ray, Japans' nuclear authorities said. A fatal dose of radiation would be more than 7 million microsieverts.

* A sharp rise in radiation would be measured in millisieverts, rather than microsieverts, as it has been up to now, which would be potentially a thousand times higher.

Radiation leaps after Japan plant blasts

FUKUSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) - Japan warned radioactive levels had become "significantly" higher around a quake-stricken nuclear power plant on Tuesday after explosions at two reactors, and the French embassy said a low-level radioactive wind could reach Tokyo within hours.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan urged people within 30 km (18 miles) of the facility north of Tokyo to remain indoors, underscoring the dramatic escalation of Japan's nuclear crisis, the world's most serious since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986.

As concern about the crippling economic impact of the nuclear and earthquake disasters mounted, Japanese stocks plunged more than 14 percent - heading for their biggest drop since 1987 -- compounding a slide of 7.6 percent the day before. The two-day fall has wiped $720 billion off the market.

In a sign of mounting fears about the risk of radiation, neighboring China said it was strengthening monitoring and Air China said it had canceled flights to Tokyo.

Kan has said Japan is facing its worst crisis since World War Two and, with the financial costs estimated at up to $180 billion, analysts said it could tip the world's third-biggest economy back into recession.

The U.S. Geological Survey upgraded the quake to magnitude 9.0, from 8.9, making it the world's fourth most powerful since 1900.

Switzerland put on hold some approvals for nuclear power plants and Germany said it was scrapping a plan to extend the life of its nuclear power stations. The White House said U.S. President Barack Obama remained committed to nuclear energy.

Whilst the Fukuskima plant's No.1 and No.3 reactors both suffered partial fuel rod meltdowns, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) had earlier said the No.2 reactor was now the biggest concern.

A sudden drop in cooling water levels when a pump ran out of fuel had fully exposed the fuel rods for a time, an official said. This could lead to the rods melting down and a radioactive leak.

TEPCO had resumed pumping sea water into the reactor early on Tuesday.

But the blasts could expose the population to longer-term exposure to radiation, which can raise the risk of thyroid and bone cancers and leukemia. Children in fetuses are especially vulnerable.

There have been a total of four explosions at the plant since it was damaged in last Friday's massive quake and tsunami. The most recent were blasts at reactors No. 2 and No. 4.

South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines said they would test Japanese food imports for radiation.

7:39AM EST March 14---We have received a report from our Japanese colleagues that Tokyo Power Electric Company is reporting that Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 has lost all cooling water and the fuel core is completed exposed. The fuel rods are very likely melting. There is no word on efforts to flood Unit 2 to avert an uncontrolled meltdown.

Two hydrogen gas explosions have already rocked Unit 1 and Unit 3. A third explosion is now likely in Unit 2 potentially releasing significant amounts of radiation into the atmosphere if the vessel fails followed by containment failure as the result of a possible full scale meltdown.

Aileen Mioko Smith has translated Japanese news reports into English indicating that the irradiated nuclear fuel storage pool at the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 atomic reactor (which has suffered a "partial core meltdown" as well as a powerful hydrogen gas explosion) is experiencing problems with keeping cooling water circulation functioning due to lack of electricity, as well as high radiation levels complicating its approach by workers.

In the meantime, there have been suggestions that an incident at reactor 3 would inherently be more dangerous than at reactors 1 and 2 because it burns “mixed oxide fuel” (MOX) containing plutonium.

Plutonium is produced during nuclear fission, so is present in all reactor cores – the longer the fuel has been there, the more plutonium will be present, up to about 1%.

In some countries, spent fuel rods are re-processed and the plutonium set to one side.

However, Japan – in an attempt to be more frugal with a valuable resource – has a programme that mixes the plutonium coming out of the re-processing facility back into new fuel rods that also contain uranium. This is MOX fuel.

I'll quote the measured doses as reported by the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) bulletin #22.

First, a "normal baseline" :MP1 (Monitoring at the North End of Site Boundary)0.036 microSv/h(19:00 March 13)→0.038 microSv/h(05:00 March 14)MP3 (Monitoring at the North/West End of site boundary)0.038 microSv/h(19:00 March 13)→0.037 microSv/h(05:00 March 14)MP4 (Monitoring at the North/West End of Site Boundary)0.036 microSv/h(19:00 March 13)→0.038 microSv/h(05:00 March 14)MP5 (Monitoring at the West End of Site Boundary)0.04 microSv/h(19:00 March 13)→0.042 microSv/h(05:00 March 14)

So the normal background around a fully functional nuclear powerplant is about 0.038 microSieverts per hour.

OK, so what's a Sievert? It's an SI (Scientific standard) unit which is 100 Rem. The biological effects of radiation are based on the number of Rem in the dose. In most places, a dose of 0.3 Rem per year is what you'd get just from normal background.

That's 0.003 sieverts, or 3,000 micro-sieverts. Divide by 8766 hours in a year, call it 0.035 microsieverts per hour, though being 500m altitude above sea level or having granite rocks nearby could easily double it. So would wearing a watch, or living in a brick rather than timber building.

The dose limit to non-radiation workers and members of the public are two percent of the annual occupational dose limit. Therefore, a non-radiation worker can receive a whole body dose of no more that 0.1 rem/year from industrial ionizing radiation. This exposure would be in addition to the 0.3 rem/year from natural background radiation and the 0.05 rem/year from man-made sources such as medical x-rays.

OK, now we have numbers established for "normal". For radiation workers, 5 Rem per year is considered safe. Actually, there's evidence that a little more might be more healthy due to stimulating the immune system - there's a J-curve effect at such low doses, we think, but we really, really, really want to be Conservative with a Capital C here. The evidence says that 5 rem is as healthy as 0.3 rem anyway. 5 rem is 57 microsieverts/hr over the course of a year.

Now let's look at the Bad News(tm). The radiation at the perimeter of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station, otherwise known as Ground Zero. And it's worse than I'd thought.MP2 (Monitoring at north- northwest of Unit1 and northwest of theEnd of Site Boundary for Unit 1 ) :450 microSv/h(20:10 March 13)→680 microSv/h(3:50 March 14)MP4 (Monitoring Car at North West Site Boundary for Unit 1)44.0 microSv/h(19:33 March 13)→56.4 microSv/h(04:08 March 14)(Surveyed by MP2 as MP1 is in the top of the cliff)MP6 (Monitoring at the Main Gate)5.2microSv/h(19:00 March 13)→66.3 microSv/h(02:50 March 14)

60 or so vs 0.035. About 1800 times normal. Stand there for a year, and you'd get your annual dose for a radiation worker. Do it for a week, and you'd get the annual dose for a civilian. Not too bad so far.

But look at Monitoring station 2. That's over 10 times more. More concerning, the trend is increasing. That means radioactive material is slowly leaking from the containment vessels, in amounts certainly indicative of severe damage to the rods - a partial meltdown - and maybe even the far more severe meltdown, involving about half the fuel, found in 3-mile island. Since the reactors are now poisoned, very little additional fission should be occurring, yet external levels are still rising. That suggests a more severe meltdown, and a consequently a longer cooling-off period.

Reactor #1 might not be the culprit. I think it's worse than that, it's dead, Jim. Moving towards room temperature. An ex-reactor. Bereft of fission, it rusts in pieces. Reactor #3, the one which burns a plutonium-uranium mix, and is nearly twice the size, that might have really gone pear-shaped.

Unfortunately, radioactive fallout from the reactor leaks is going to hit the United States and Canada. Alaska, Hawaii and the west coast of the United States should prepare themselves for the invisible hazard that can rain down upon them within days or over the next weeks and months. in Meltdown Japan - Fallout Tracking - News - Health Solutions

Context -- some background information -- is certainly needed for articles such as Florida Oil Spill Law's Radiation around Fukushima nearing levels where “humans vomit uncontrollably” and “hair can be stripped from the body” -- but don't blame FOSL, they were trying to give context. The problem is that their source, UK's The Sun (Nuke Cloud Crisis), is not a trustworthy one (in my opinion); they are leveraging the fact that we want context, that we want understanding, into more 'hits' or reader popularity (think NY Post). At the same time, and also for 'hits', The Sun is deploying the scare factor, and giving no context to back it up. That's right, no context or external standard, no sieverts or rems.

This may result in unnecessary freaking out.

May I offer, as an antidote and prophylaxis, some much needed comparison and context so we can see exactly how scary this is. This is the best explication of context I so far have found (more on that below): Japanese Reactor Radiation - The Numbers --- the author (a rocket scientist, according to the profile) analyzes "The radiation at the perimeter of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station, otherwise known as Ground Zero" (I'm assuming this is reactor #3) :

About 1800 times normal. Stand there for a year, and you'd get your annual dose for a radiation worker. Do it for a week, and you'd get the annual dose for a civilian. Not too bad so far.

But look at Monitoring station 2. That's over 10 times more. More concerning, the trend is increasing. That means radioactive material is slowly leaking from the containment vessels, in amounts certainly indicative of severe damage to the rods - a partial meltdown - and maybe even the far more severe meltdown, involving about half the fuel, found in 3-mile island. Since the reactors are now poisoned, very little additional fission should be occurring, yet external levels are still rising. That suggests a more severe meltdown, and a consequently a longer cooling-off period.

Reactor #1 might not be the culprit. I think it's worse than that, it's dead, Jim. Moving towards room temperature. An ex-reactor. Bereft of fission, it rusts in pieces. Reactor #3, the one which burns a plutonium-uranium mix, and is nearly twice the size, that might have really gone pear-shaped.

So there you have it. Don't get me wrong, FOSL (Florida Oil Spill Law) is a fantastic source. I recommend them. Being thus misled, as above, is not common (even though it happens from time to time), and they have quickly become my top news aggregator during this serious crisis. As they continue to be for news regarding the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster and its unfolding consequences. Check them out. Tell your friends, especially if they, like mine, are freaking out. (Hey, if you want feedback, join the forum, there are good people there).

But A.E. Brain has been the first to provide, more intelligibly than Wikipedia for this freaking out child of the cold war, the background information we so desperately need. I need. You need. Read it. I'm going to go read it again, myself.

During CNN’s live special coverage in Japan, airing right now, Anderson Cooper just reported a second nuclear reactor (reactor #3) just exploded. The explosion follows the earlier explosion of reactor #1 which Anderson Cooper reports is now reported to have white smoke rising from it.

Video of the Second Nuclear Reactor Explosion That the Mainstream Media Is Hiding

I moved this video to the top of the page because it shows what the media isn’t showing the public. As you read the official media reports below you’ll notice the media reports of the explosion don’t match the events caught on video.

To be fair the mainstream media is simply reporting the information that the Japanese government is releasing but they must be complacent in hiding this.

Mainstream media videos only show the explosion from many miles at a resolution so low you can see see virtually nothing and those videos don’t even appear to match the video of the explosion below.

For example, the main stream media videos of the second explosion that I have watched have similar resolution to the screen cap below, courtesy of The Intel Hub.

Now watch the following two videos keeping in mind that if I found this video so can multi-billion dollar mainstream media corporations.

Keep these videos in mind as you read the live blog updates below containing snippets of main stream media reports on the story. Note how the media articles are all watered down and fail to reflect the devastation shown in the explosion videos above and below. It also appears that the amount of devastation caught in these videos conflict with the Japanese government’s official version of the the extent and magnitude of the second reactor explosion.

Here is a second video of the explosion at the nuclear reactor. The news anchor is absolutely shocked while watching it.

Updates on Second Nuclear Reactor Explosion In Japan Will Follow

Update 10:37 PM ESTThere was just reports of an aftershock and Dr. Sanjay Gupta reports a new tsunami warning has just been issued. The Japanese military has located new waves from a 6.0+ after shock from the mega earthquake coming. They are projecting a second tsunami of up to 5 meters tall is forecast to hit the Japan coast within the next 5 minutes.

Update 10:55 PM EST

CNN just came back from break and aired a pre-recorded video almost pretending like they didn’t just report the second explosion. Anderson Cooper seemed a little spooked before the the break even asking their on air Nuclear expert if he should leave the area because he is reporting close to the location of the second explosion. The news of the explosion just came in during the two hour special as Anderson was reporting live on the ground.

I can find no reports online at the moment on the second nuclear reactor exploding or the cause of the white smoke coming from the first reactor.

In the mean time here is some background on the second reactor that was just reported to have exploded. The video shows officials warning that a second explosion is likely.

Second Blast Possible at Japan Atomic Power Plant Even as Radiation Falls

Japanese officials battling to prevent a potential meltdown at a nuclear power station said an explosion was possible at a second reactor building after the plant’s cooling system failed.

Water levels temporarily fell at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant 135 miles north of Tokyo, raising the possibility of a hydrogen explosion, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said in Tokyo today.

Asia’s largest utility is seeking to avoid a meltdown of two reactors at the nuclear power station by flooding them with water and boric acid to eliminate the potential for a catastrophic release of radiation into the atmosphere. The station lost power to keep the reactor core cool after the March 11 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in Japan.

CNN reports officials are “assuming” that the second reactor explosion is a hydrogen explosion to the outer building that surrounds the reactor. They stress officials are making this assumption to quell public fears.

A HYDROGEN explosion has shaken a quake-damaged reactor at Fukushima, as Japan races to avert a meltdown of two reactors

Live television showed an explosion at the nuclear power plant and plumes of smoke rising from the building. A wall has collapsed.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the blast, at the number 3 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, was believed to be caused by hydrogen and happened at around 11.01 Japan time.

“We believe it was a hydrogen explosion. It is not immediately known if it affected the reactor,” said spokesman Ryo Miyake.

…

A massive column of smoke was seen belching from the plant’s No. 3 unit. The reactor had been under emergency watch for a possible explosion as pressure built up there after a hydrogen blast on Saturday in the facility’s Unit 1.

Officials have been racing stave off multiple reactor meltdowns after a devastating quake and tsunami incapacitated the Fukushima plant.

More than 180,000 people have evacuated the area, and up to 160 may have been exposed to radiation.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan was quoted by Kyodo News earlier as saying that the Fukushima plant, where crews are struggling to control overheating reactors, was still in an “alarming” state.

Tokyo’s stock market plunged 5.42 percent in opening trade as investors absorbed the impact of Friday’s earthquake, the biggest in Japan’s history, and the devastating tsunami that followed.

There seems to be some conflicting reports about the second explosion, or it may be possible that there have been three separate explosions. Reports indicate that the the second explosion occurred in reactor #3 was caused from a hydrogen explosion and occurred in the outer building the reactor.

However, as the Guardian points out live reports out of Japan are showing video for the hydrogen explosion in the outer building of plant #1. The Guardian reports the outer building explosion is in fact a 2nd explosion at plant#1, which corroborates reports of white smoke coming from plant#1 and would be a separate explosion than the explosion in plant #3 reported by CNN.

Japan Earthquake Fallout: Second Nuclear Reactor Explosion

A screen grab taken from live news footage by Japanese public broadcaster NHK on March 14, 2011 shows a collasped building (CR) at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power station number three reactor after a hydrogen explosion. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

2.50am: Japanese television earlier reported that the sea level had dropped five metres off the coast of Fukushima. The feeling in Japan is already tense following an earlier aftershock this morning, and much fear spreading across the country after unconfirmed reports of another tsunami.

2.40am: Good morning. It’s now more than three days since the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, but there is little sign of relief for survivors.

• There has been a second blast at the Fukushima No 1 nuclear plant. Television footage suggests the outer building of the third reactor has been blown away – as in the first blast – but officials believe the reactor container remains intact and says there is little prospect of a significant release of radioactive material. Officials warned yesterday that there might be another hydrogen explosion.

• The Daily Yomiuri newspaper says police are reporting about 1,000 bodies have been found in Minamisanriku, Miyagi and another 1,000 on the Ojika Peninsula coast in the prefecture.

Update 11:32 PM

CNN has acknowledged the conflicting reports coming in about the explosions and said they will make clarifications shortly.

Mr. Edano says the reactor’s inner containment vessel holding nuclear rods is intact, allaying some fears of the risk to the environment and public.

A massive column of smoke was seen belching from the plant’s No. 3 unit Monday. The No. 3 Unit reactor had been under emergency watch for a possible explosion as pressure built up there following a hydrogen blast Saturday in the facility’s Unit 1.

And The Star reports that efforts to prevent a full blown meltdown may not be going as planned.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency reported the explosion at about 11:40 a.m. local time – it was not clear precisely when the explosion itself had occurred.

But it was deeply disturbing news for a government trying calm national and international fears over the stability of the country’s nuclear reactors following Friday’s powerful earthquake.

…

But as the emergency continues to mount, there is a growing sense here, born of a dearth of information, that Japan might be sailing into uncharted waters.

Japan’s famously aggressive media has been frustrated by an inability to get clear answers from the government.

“Even now we don’t know what’s really going on,” Takashi Oshima, a respected journalist from Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper told the Star. “We really have no idea how many people have died. It’s scary.

“My kids called from New York and asked me, ‘How many died, Dad?’ and I had to say, ‘I don’t know. Maybe 10,000, 20,000, 30,000?’

…

Worryingly, a senior government official acknowledged Sunday that gauges on at least one nuclear reactor that engineers are working feverishly to cool by using seawater are not working — a strong indication that the government might have no reliable means of measuring the effectiveness of its efforts.

Reports say that the cooling process could take as long as 10 days.

If they fail, the containers that house the reactors’ cores could melt, or even explode, releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere.

Sunday and into Monday morning, Tokyo’s skyscrapers continued to sway and furniture trembled intermittently through the night as aftershocks continued.

Update: 12:05 AM EST

News reports are now being posted to Youtube. This one found via The Intel Hub.

CNN has just reported there is still “unexplained” white smoke coming from reactor #1.

CNN Report on Second Nuclear Reactor Explosion

Note the double speak in the article coming from government officials. “We don’t believe there a radiation leak – Yet We have elevated levels of radiation”. “We don’t believe a meltdown has occurred – Yet the Hydrogen explosions at the Nuclear reactors is likely due to a build up of hydrogen caused by a meltdown”

Explosion rocks another Japanese nuclear reactor building

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW: A blast occurs Monday at the Daiichi’s plant No. 3 reactor building, an official says

NEW: The official says he doesn’t believe there’s been a massive radioactive leak

IAEA says the radiation near the Onagawa plant “normal,” may be from Daiichi

Authorities have not confirmed meltdowns, because the reactors are so hot

(CNN) — Fresh white smoke rose again Monday from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, caused by an explosion at a building tied to the facility’s No. 3 reactor.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said that, according to the head of the nuclear facility, the container vessel surrounding the reactor is still intact. Initial reports suggest that radiation levels rose following the explosion late Monday morning, but Edano said he does not believe there has been a massive leak.

“We are now collecting information on the concentration of radiation,” he said.

A wall of the building collapsed due to the blast, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK, which showed plumes of smoke above the plant.

The secretary said that water continues to be injected into the plant’s No. 3 reactor. That fact, and the pressure levels, has led authorities to believe that the reactor itself remains intact.

…

The incident is the latest affecting the Daiichi, the hardest hit of several nuclear plants affected since Friday’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Officials said that the explosion was likely caused by a buildup of hydrogen gas, similar to what had happened Saturday at the same nuclear plant’s No. 1 reactor.

The 600 residents remaining within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the plant, despite an earlier evacuation order, have been ordered to stay indoors, according to Edano.

Officials earlier said that they were operating on the presumption that there may be a partial meltdown in the No. 3 and No. 1 nuclear reactors at the Daiichi plant. Authorities have not yet been able to confirm a meltdown, because it is too hot inside the affected reactors to check.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, said in a press release late Sunday that radiation levels outside that plant remain high.

Japan’s Kyodo newsagency, citing the same company, said that there were measurements of 751 microsieverts and 650 microsieverts of radiation early Monday. Both are above the legal limit, albeit less than one reading recorded Sunday. A microsievert is an internationally recognized unit measuring radiation dosage, with people typically exposed during an entire year to a total of about 1,000 microsieverts.

…

On Sunday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said accumulating hydrogen gas “may potentially cause an explosion” in the building housing the No. 3 reactor at the Daiichi plant.

At another plant, in Onagawa, authorities early Sunday noted high radiation levels. The International Atomic Energy Agency said later — using information from officials in Japan — levels returned to “normal” and found no emissions of radioactivity” from Onagawa’s three reactors.

“The current assumption of the Japanese authorities is that the increased level may have been due to a release of radioactive material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant” located 135 kilometers (about 85 miles) north of Onagawa, the agency said.

Japan’s nuclear and industrial safety agency said late Sunday the wind was moving north/northwest — which could carry airborne radioactive material near the city of Sendai and toward the Onagawa facility.

….

The crisis has stoked fears of a full-on nuclear meltdown, a catastrophic failure of the reactor core that has the potential for widespread release of radiation.

High levels of hydrogen, as evidenced at Daiichi, is one sign that a meltdown may be occurring. So, too, is the detection noted of radioactive cesium outside that plant, according to Toshihiro Bannai, an official with Japan’s nuclear and industrial safety agency. This could be caused by the melting of fuel rods inside the reactor, indicating at least a partial meltdown.

Despite such evidence, Noriyuki Shikata, a spokesman for Prime Minister Naoto Kan repeated Edano’s assertion that the situation is “under control” and said he would not describe what was occurring in the reactors as a “meltdown.”

But Cooke, also editor of Nuclear Intelligence Weekly for the atomic-energy community, said she’s not convinced authorities have a full handle on what she called “this hugely dangerous technology.”

“The more they say they’re in control, the more I sense things may be out of control,” she said.

…

Edano has said there have been no leaks of radioactive material at any plants. Radioactive steam has been released intentionally to lessen growing pressure in the two Daiichi reactors — in an amount authorities have described as minimal.

Still, on Sunday, Edano said nine people who were evacuated from near the Daiichi plant tested positive for high radiation on skin and clothing. This is in addition to at least three electric company workers who fell ill due to possible exposure, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. said in a statement.

Even if there’s is no further catastrophe, the nuclear situation — part of what Prime Minister Kan called the “toughest and most difficult crisis for Japan” since the end of World War II — has clearly made an impact.

Cooke said that it may take years to fully assess the damage at the worst-hit reactors, much less to get them working again. And authorities may never definitively determine how much radiation was emitted, or how many got sick because of it.

…

If the effort to cool the nuclear fuel inside the reactor fails completely — a scenario that experts who have spoken to CNN say is unlikely — the resulting release of radiation could cause enormous damage to the plant and/or release radiation into the atmosphere or water. That could lead to widespread cancer and other health problems, experts say.

Authorities have downplayed such a scenario, insisting the situation appears under control and that radiation levels in the air are not dangerous. Still, as what they described as “a precaution,” at least 180,000 people who live within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the plant have been ordered to leave.

“The bottom line is that we just don’t know what’s going to happen in the next couple of days and, frankly, neither do the people who run the system,” added Dr. Ira Helfand, a member of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Update 2:14 AM

There is little new information about the second explosion coming out. Repeated clips of the Japanese government denying any significant radiation would leak as a result from the explosion. I am currently watching CNN and NHK Japanese news in English. The major story being ran is the conservation of electricity and the plummet of the Japanese stock market. The Japanese markets crashed on the news of the quake after finishing down Friday. The Yen continues to fall and American stock futures are sharply down. The Nikkie index just closed down 633.94 or 6.18% to close at 9,620.49.

Explosion rocks another Japanese nuclear reactor building

NEW: A blast occurs Monday at the Daiichi's plant No. 3 reactor building, an official says

NEW: The official says he doesn't believe there's been a massive radioactive leak

IAEA says the radiation near the Onagawa plant "normal," may be from Daiichi

Authorities have not confirmed meltdowns, because the reactors are so hot

(CNN) -- Fresh white smoke rose again Monday from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, caused by an explosion at a building tied to the facility's No. 3 reactor.

Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said that, according to the head of the nuclear facility, the container vessel surrounding the reactor is still intact. Initial reports suggest that radiation levels rose following the explosion late Monday morning, but Edano said he does not believe there has been a massive leak.

"We are now collecting information on the concentration of radiation," he said.

A wall of the building collapsed due to the blast, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK, which showed plumes of smoke above the plant.

The secretary said that water continues to be injected into the plant's No. 3 reactor. That fact, and the pressure levels, has led authorities to believe that the reactor itself remains intact.

Explainer: Producing nuclear energy

The incident is the latest affecting the Daiichi, the hardest hit of several nuclear plants affected since Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Officials said that the explosion was likely caused by a buildup of hydrogen gas, similar to what had happened Saturday at the same nuclear plant's No. 1 reactor.

The 600 residents remaining within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the plant, despite an earlier evacuation order, have been ordered to stay indoors, according to Edano.

Officials earlier said that they were operating on the presumption that there may be a partial meltdown in the No. 3 and No. 1 nuclear reactors at the Daiichi plant. Authorities have not yet been able to confirm a meltdown, because it is too hot inside the affected reactors to check.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, said in a press release late Sunday that radiation levels outside that plant remain high.

Japan's Kyodo newsagency, citing the same company, said that there were measurements of 751 microsieverts and 650 microsieverts of radiation early Monday. Both are above the legal limit, albeit less than one reading recorded Sunday. A microsievert is an internationally recognized unit measuring radiation dosage, with people typically exposed during an entire year to a total of about 1,000 microsieverts.

On Sunday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said accumulating hydrogen gas "may potentially cause an explosion" in the building housing the No. 3 reactor at the Daiichi plant.

At another plant, in Onagawa, authorities early Sunday noted high radiation levels. The International Atomic Energy Agency said later -- using information from officials in Japan -- levels returned to "normal" and found no emissions of radioactivity" from Onagawa's three reactors.

"The current assumption of the Japanese authorities is that the increased level may have been due to a release of radioactive material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant" located 135 kilometers (about 85 miles) north of Onagawa, the agency said.

Japan's nuclear and industrial safety agency said late Sunday the wind was moving north/northwest -- which could carry airborne radioactive material near the city of Sendai and toward the Onagawa facility.

Most experts aren't expecting a reprieve of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, which killed 32 plant workers and firefighters in the former Soviet Union and at least 4,000 from cancers tied to radioactive material released by the plant. But in some ways -- especially the fact multiple reactors are affected, versus one in Chernobyl -- Japan's crisis is unique.

"This is unprecedented," said Stephanie Cooke, the author of "In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age." "You've never had a situation with multiple reactors at risk."

These issues come despite Japan's solid reputation in the nuclear power field. Japan is heavily dependent on the energy source, with 54 plants and eight slated for construction, said Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action, an environmental group.

Daiichi's No. 1 reactor -- the oldest of the six units at the site, according to World Nuclear Association, all of which are boiling-water reactors -- became operational in November 1970.

"Nuclear facilities in Japan ... were built to withstand earthquakes -- but not an 8.9 earthquake," said James Walsh, a CNN contributor and research associate at MIT's security studies program.

The crisis has stoked fears of a full-on nuclear meltdown, a catastrophic failure of the reactor core that has the potential for widespread release of radiation.

High levels of hydrogen, as evidenced at Daiichi, is one sign that a meltdown may be occurring. So, too, is the detection noted of radioactive cesium outside that plant, according to Toshihiro Bannai, an official with Japan's nuclear and industrial safety agency. This could be caused by the melting of fuel rods inside the reactor, indicating at least a partial meltdown.

Despite such evidence, Noriyuki Shikata, a spokesman for Prime Minister Naoto Kan repeated Edano's assertion that the situation is "under control" and said he would not describe what was occurring in the reactors as a "meltdown."

But Cooke, also editor of Nuclear Intelligence Weekly for the atomic-energy community, said she's not convinced authorities have a full handle on what she called "this hugely dangerous technology."

"The more they say they're in control, the more I sense things may be out of control," she said.

The Daiichi plant has a containment vessel, which theoretically would capture radioactive material if a full meltdown occurs.

In the meantime, government and power company officials are working to prevent even such a calamity -- even if it means rendering the Daiichi plant inoperable.

Authorities ordered the injection of sea water and boron into the affected reactors, even though salt and boron will corrode the reactor.

"Essentially, they are waving the white flag and saying, 'This plant is done,'" Walsh said. "This is a last-ditch mechanism to try to prevent overheating and to prevent a partial or full meltdown."

Edano has said there have been no leaks of radioactive material at any plants. Radioactive steam has been released intentionally to lessen growing pressure in the two Daiichi reactors -- in an amount authorities have described as minimal.

Still, on Sunday, Edano said nine people who were evacuated from near the Daiichi plant tested positive for high radiation on skin and clothing. This is in addition to at least three electric company workers who fell ill due to possible exposure, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. said in a statement.

Even if there's is no further catastrophe, the nuclear situation -- part of what Prime Minister Kan called the "toughest and most difficult crisis for Japan" since the end of World War II -- has clearly made an impact.

Cooke said that it may take years to fully assess the damage at the worst-hit reactors, much less to get them working again. And authorities may never definitively determine how much radiation was emitted, or how many got sick because of it.

Then there's the short- and long-term impact of Japan's electric grid: Soon after the quake, power was knocked out to 10% of Japan's households. Most of those people now have electricity, though experts say it is highly unlikely the most affected reactors will ever be operational again.

Beyond that, the crisis may have a significant impact the nuclear power movement. Walsh noted that while some countries, like China, may go forward in creating new reactors, others planned for South Korea, Turkey and elsewhere may pull back.

But assessing the far-reaching implications of the crisis isn't the top priority now. Instead, the focus is more on making sure that the situation does not deteriorate even further and put more lives at risk.

If the effort to cool the nuclear fuel inside the reactor fails completely -- a scenario that experts who have spoken to CNN say is unlikely -- the resulting release of radiation could cause enormous damage to the plant and/or release radiation into the atmosphere or water. That could lead to widespread cancer and other health problems, experts say.

Authorities have downplayed such a scenario, insisting the situation appears under control and that radiation levels in the air are not dangerous. Still, as what they described as "a precaution," at least 180,000 people who live within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the plant have been ordered to leave.

"The bottom line is that we just don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of days and, frankly, neither do the people who run the system," added Dr. Ira Helfand, a member of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Experts in Israel and abroad divided on scope of disaster at Japan's nuclear plants, as Japanese government hasn't provided accurate information regarding threat posed by explosions at Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that officials still do not know if there have been meltdowns in the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi's nuclear facility in northeast Japan. But as they attempt to cool down radioactive material and release pressure inside the reactors, he said authorities were working under the presumption that such meltdowns have taken place.

It is very important to understand that this situation is changing every minute and that no one knows for sure if deadly radiation will make it to the U.S. west coast.

BBC Update 1:53pm PST

“The New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science blog has been asking nuclear scientists about the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It says: “The real fear is that harmful radioactive material will escape from the reactor core.”

Fox News is reporting that the fuel rods in ALL three damaged reactors are set to meltdown. This is not fear mongering this is simple fact. The BBC is also reporting that Japanese Officials are in full scale panic mode. Moscow officials have not ruled out the fact that Japan may be covering up the extent of the damage.

Japanese officials have upgraded the nuclear alert level to a level 5 incident meaning that large quantities of radioactive material have been released and there is a high probability of significant public exposure.

The alert level was raised after the nuclear fuel rods became completely exposed and the nuclear reactor completely lost its cooling ability.

The size of the evacuation area has been expanded from a 20 KM radius to a 40 KM radius (about 25 miles) with the nuclear alert level upgrade.

The upgraded alert level comes on news that wind has carried the radioactive cloud 100 miles north of the reactor.

Update: 9:08pm PST – From the BBC - Higher than normal radiation levels are detected in Tokyo, the AFP is quoting the city government as saying.

Update: 7:51pm PST - BREAKING NEWS: Radiation 400 times annual legal limit measured near No. 3 reactor – KYODO The Prime Minister of Japan was quoted as saying that there was a high risk of radiation coming out of the plant in the future.

Update: 7:39pm PST -The French Embassy in Tokyo has reportedly said that weak radioactive material could reach Tokyo in 10 hrs.

Update: 7:24pm PST – The Prime Minister has admitted that the containment chamber was damaged. On going fire at reactor 4. NBC is reporting that this is the 2nd worst nuclear disaster in history. All people in a 20km radius are being asked to evacuate if they have not already.

Update: 6:20pm PST -Kyodo reporting “No. 2 reactor container damaged” France is also reporting that the disaster is a 5 or 6 on a nuclear disaster scale of 1 to 7

Update: 5:30pm PST – Japan’s chief Cabinet secretary was quoted as saying that he could NOT rule out the possibility of meltdowns at all three plants!

Update: 5:22pm PST -The radioactive fuel rods at the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 power station were fully exposed at one point Monday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said, raising the possibility that it suffered a partial core meltdown according to the Japan Times.

Update: 5:08pm PST – There is a high possibility that radioactive substances are being released. Kyodo has reported that radioactive materials are being released!

A fire at the fourth reactor of the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant resulted in a leak of highly concentrated radiation, the Japanese premier said on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan called on the citizens residing within the 20-km (13 miles) distance from the reactor to immediately leave this zone and those living more than 20-30 km (13-17 miles) from the NPP to stay in their houses, but to shut windows and doors.

"I sincerely ask all citizens within the 20-km distance from the reactor to leave this zone," he said in a televised address.

TOKYO, March 15 (RIA Novosti)

Webmaster's Commentary:

The United States Government insists there is no danger from fallout as long as you do not breath from now until Thanksgiving.

Although the number-four reactor was shut for maintenance when the quake and tsunami struck last Friday, "spent nuclear fuel in the reactor heated up, creating hydrogen and triggered a hydrogen explosion".

He said radioactive substances were leaked along with the hydrogen.

Webmaster's Commentary:

If true, that means the reactor cores themselves were damaged in the initial quake to the point where the debris collected together to spontaneously fission.

Japanese nuclear reactor update: Amid signs of progress, new problemsScientists warn of risks from spent-fuel cooling pools and plutonium-rich, mixed-oxide fuel inside one nuclear reactor, even as the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors appear to be coming under control.

The threat from plutonium-rich MOX

Another little-reported concern is a small but potentially dangerous amount of plutonium-based "MOX" – mixed-oxide fuel – inside the No. 3 reactor, says Dr. Lyman, who notes that plutonium particles are more dangerous to the human body than other particles that might be emitted.

Tokyo Electric said some three yards of a MOX fuel rod was above the water line, suggesting that plutonium and other elements could be in the gases vented to the atmosphere, reported the Kyodo News Agency.

"If the core of that No. 3 reactor melts and venting occurs, some of that plutonium and other nasty elements present in that fuel could end up on the winds," Lyman says.

Japanese authorities also today informed the IAEA at 04:50 CET that the spent fuel storage pond at the Unit 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is on fire and radioactivity is being released directly into the atmosphere. … Read more >>

For more than 40 years, UCS has served as a nuclear safety watchdog and a reliable, independent source of information on nuclear power technology and its risks. UCS technical experts are working hard to provide timely, updated analysis of what is happening at the stricken facilities and what the implications may be.

You can find regular updates on our blog "All Things Nuclear" and learn about why events have unfolded in the way they have, where the situation may be headed, and what it may mean for the people around the facilities and the environment.

The Fukushima I and Fukushima 3 nuclear reactors have both previously experienced explosions, and are in some stage of meltdown.

Today, Kyodo News reports:

Fuel rods at the quake-hit Fukushima ... No. 2 reactor were fully exposed at one point after its cooling functions failed, the plant operator said Monday, indicating the critical situation of the reactor's core beginning to melt due to overheating.

Webmaster's Commentary:

I have to wonder if we would be facing this crisis if the International Atomic Energy Agency had focused on inspecting the safety of the very real power stations of the world instead of wasting all their time and resources trying to find the fantasy nuclear weapons of Iraq and Iran to justify wars of conquest.

I also wish to point out that there is a type of reactor, Thorium-cycle reactors, which cannot melt-down and which cannot be used to create nuclear weapons. The $14 trillion borrowed and spent to cover up the Wall Street Mortgage-Backed Security fraud and keep the criminal bankers out of jail could have paid for 130 of those safe power stations for the United States, freeing us from the need to murder the people living over the Mideast oil.

The Japanese nuclear reactor hit by the tsunami went into 'meltdown' today, as officials admitted that fuel rods appear to be melting inside three damaged reactors.

That means there is a risk that molten nuclear fuel can melt through the reactor's safety barriers and cause a serious radiation leak.

There have already been explosions inside two over-heating reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, and the fuel rods inside a third were partially exposed as engineers desperately fight to keep them under control after the tsunami knocked out emergency cooling systems.

Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said it was 'highly likely' that the fuel rods inside all three stricken reactors are melting.

The news keeps repeating that this is a hydrogen explosion. But Hydrogen, when it burns, burns with a clear blue flame, almost invisible. Note the orange flash at the moment of the blast. Hydrogen, when it burns, produces water vapor, or steam. The combustion products emerging from the ruined reactor do not look like a steam blast. Burning hydrogen is not high-velocity, so pulverized concrete does not account for the color.As a side note, burned Plutonium, Pu4+, is yellow brown.

New explosion shakes stricken Japanese nuclear plant

FUKUSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) - A fresh explosion rocked a damaged Japanese nuclear power plant on Tuesday where engineers have been pumping sea water into a reactor to prevent a catastrophic meltdown in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Japan's nuclear safety agency said Tuesday's explosion at the plant's No.2 reactor was caused by hydrogen. There was no immediate word on damage, but Jiji news agency quoted the trade ministry as saying radiation levels remained low after the blast, the third at the plant since Saturday.

Japan has asked the United States for more equipment to help cool reactors at the Fukushima nuclear complex, which was hit on Monday by a dangerous drop in cooling water levels that exposed fuel rods in the No. 2 reactor.

The full extent of the destruction wreaked by Friday's massive quake and tsunami that followed it was still becoming clear, as rescuers combed through the region north of Tokyo where officials say at least 10,000 people were killed.

Switzerland put on hold some approvals for nuclear power plants and Germany said it was scrapping a plan to extend the life of its nuclear power stations. The White House said U.S. President Barack Obama remained committed to nuclear energy.

Whilst the Fukuskima plant's No.1 and No.3 reactors both suffered partial fuel rod meltdowns, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the No. 2 reactor was now the biggest concern.

A sudden drop in cooling water levels when a pump ran out of fuel had fully exposed the fuel rods for a time, an official said. This could lead to the rods melting down and a possible radioactive leak.

TEPCO said it had resumed pumping sea water into the reactor early on Tuesday.

The Pentagon was expected to announce that the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, which is sailing in the Pacific, passed through a radioactive cloud from stricken nuclear reactors in Japan, causing crew members on deck to receive a month’s worth of radiation in about an hour, government officials said Sunday.

The officials added that American helicopters flying missions about 60 miles north of the damaged reactors became coated with particulate radiation that had to be washed off.

There was no indication that any of the military personnel had experienced ill effects from the exposure. (Everyone is exposed to a small amount of natural background radiation.)

Fukushima reactor No. 2 has suffered an explosion (Level 4 incident) typical of a high energy release and the fuel rods are now fully exposed according to the news source Jiji who had quoted the plant operator.

The Japanese government is quickly loosing credibility with the people as a meltdown is assumed imminent at this point.

Nuclear fallout is in the air. Karl Rove stated on Fox News Monday that the Japanese government had announced 144 mR/hr readings locally. This low number could be skewed in an attempt to calm the masses (100 mR/hr is considered high RAD).

The U.S. military has been instructed to pull back assets including ships further to a safe distance due to radiation exposure.

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan is fleeing the area and performing full nuclear decontamination scrub downs of the crew due to the explosion and radioactive release. They were 100 miles out from the reactor when radiation detection alarms sounded. 17 crew have been treated for contamination.

Disaster on land ensues as millions struggle to find food and a safe haven.

Swarms of earthquakes and increased seismic activity move south as the earths crust is literally grinding and ripping open.

More tsunami’s are anticipated as a 10 footer was spotted yesterday in the region.

Economic worries play in as the NIKKEI (Asian Market) plunged over 6 points on the first day of trading since the disaster.

WASHINGTON — American Navy officials in Japan said early Monday that 17 military personnel who had been aboard three helicopters assisting in the earthquake relief effort had been exposed to low levels of contamination.Cmdr. Jeff A. Davis, a spokesman for the American Seventh Fleet in Japan, said the Navy personnel — who apparently had flown through a radioactive plume from a damaged nuclear power plant — had been ordered to dispose of their uniforms and to undergo a decontamination scrub that had successfully removed radioactive particles.

“They received very, very low levels of contamination,” Commander Davis said in a telephone interview from Japan early Monday.

Following a high-level meeting called by the lame-duck prime minister, Japanese agencies are no longer releasing independent reports without prior approval from the top. The censorship is being carried out following the imposition of the Article 15 Emergency Law. Official silencing of bad news is a polite way of reassuring the public.According to the chief Cabinet Secretary, reactor heat is being lowered and radiation levels are coming down. The Unit 1 reactor container is not cracked despite the explosion that destroyed its building.

The explosion did not erupt out of the reactor.

So what caused the explosion that blasted away the reinforced concrete roof and walls? Silence.

Hidden nuclear crisis

The recurrent tendency to deny systemic errors - "in order to avoid public panic" - is rooted in the determination of an entrenched bureaucracy to protect itself rather than in any stated purpose of serving the nation or its people. That's the unspoken rule of thumb in most governments, and the point is that Japan is no shining exception.

So what today is being silenced on orders from the Tokyo government? The official mantra is that all five nuclear power plants in the northeast are locked down, safe and not leaking. The cloaked reality is that at least one of those - Tepco's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant - is under an emergency alert at a level indicative of a quake-caused internal rupture. The Fukushima powerhouse is one of the world's largest with six boiling-water reactors.

Over past decades, the Japanese public has been reassured by the Tokyo Electric Power Company that its nuclear reactors are prepared for any eventuality. Yet the mystery in Fukushima is not the first unreported problem with nuclear power, only the most recent. Back in 1996 amid a reactor accident in Ibaraki province, the government never admitted that radioactive fallout had drifted over the northeastern suburbs of Tokyo. Our reporters got confirmation from monitoring stations, but the press was under a blanket order not to run any alarming news, the facts be damned. For a nation that's lived under the atomic cloud of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, total denial becomes possible now only because the finger on the button is our own.

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USA: The White House sent in a team to consult withe US-friendly Naoto Kan government. Instead of dispatching in experts from the Department of Energy, Nuclear Safety Agency and Health Department, President Obamas sent representatives of USAID, which is cover for the CIA.

The presence of these paranoiac bumblers only confirms suspicions of a top-level cover up. Why would the Agency be worried about the disaster? There are security considerations, such as regional "enemies" Pyongyang, Beijing and Moscow taking advantage of the crisis. To the contrary, China and Russia have both offered carte blanche civilian aid.

Second, to coordinate a pro-American public campaign synchronized with the US relief effort from the nuclear carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Many Japanese might actually be alarmed by Navy ships offshore, reminding them of the firebombing campaign in the big war, and US helicopters rumbling overhead as if Sendai was Danang Vietnam 1968. The whole "aid" exercise smacks of a con job aimed at keeping US military bases in Okinawa and surreptitiously at a Japanese Self-Defense Force firing range at the foot of Mount Fuji.

Third, to ensure the safekeeping of Misawa Air Force Base in quake-hit Iwate Prefecture. Misawa, the hub of US electronic warfare and high-tech espionage in East Asia with its fleet of P-3 Orions and an ECHELON eavesdropping antennae.

PRC: In contrast to Washington's ulterior motives, China in an unprecedented move has sent in an emergency team into Japan. Unbeknownst to the world, China has world-leading expertise in extinguishing nuclear meltdowns and blocking radiation leaks at their uranium mines and military nuclear plants. This was discovered on a 2003 visit to a geological research center in the uranium-rich Altai mountain region of Xinjiang, where a scientist disclosed "off the record" China's development of mineral blends that block radiation "much more than 90 percent, nearly totally". When asked why the institute doesn't commercialize their formulas, he responded: "We've never thought about that." That's too bad because if one of China's exports was ever needed, it's their radiation blanket.

Russia: Moscow too, is offering unconditional aid, despite ongoing territorial conflict with Japan over four northern islands. The Russian Air Force, from bases in Kamchatka and the Kuriles, could play a key role in cloud-seeding to prevent radioactive particles from drifting over to the United States. Americans should learn how to act as team players in an international community, especially now their own children's lives will be at stake in the event of a total meltdown in Fukushima.

Canada: Meteorology is becoming evermore interesting, despite the "what me worry" attitudes of the global-warming skeptics. A freak of nature called El Nino Variable, if it occurs later this spring, could push the Pacific jet stream northward, meaning western Canada and more U.S. states could find themselves along a winding stream of radiation fallout from Japan.

Correction to Monitor 1: In our haste, we blurred over some important details on the use of potassium iodide tablets. These are taken to block radioactive iodine-131 from affecting the human thyroid gland, thus lowering the risk of cancer and other disorders.

Yoichi Shimatsu currently with Fourth Media (China) is former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, has covered the earthquakes in San Francisco and Kobe, participated in the rescue operation immediately after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and led the field research for an architectural report on structural design flaws that led to the tsunami death toll in Thailand.

A new three-metre (10 foot) high tsunami rolled toward the disaster-shattered northeast coast of Japan early Monday, with authorities warning it would strike within minutes.

Webmaster's Commentary:

There was no quake and no mention of a warning at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. So if this tsunami is real, then it means the walls of the sub-ocean trench near the epicenter are collapsing from all the shaking. Tsunamis created by undersea land movements have the potential to be far greater than those produce directly by a quake.

The massive earthquake that struck northeast Japan Friday (March 11) has shortened the length Earth's day by a fraction and shifted how the planet's mass is distributed.

A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth's spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

In the United States, the nuclear power industry is now in total spin mode, trying to make sure people don't question the future of nuclear power. General Electric, which manufactured the reactors in the Fukushima power plant, experienced huge stock losses over the last few days. Now, it seems the orders from the top are to tell people nuclear power is "still safe." GE, of course, is a huge asset holder in NBC, one of the major media players in this whole charade. I very much doubt NBC openly discloses to its viewers that its news reporting may be entirely biased because it is largely owned by the very same corporate conglomerate that earns money from the construction of nuclear power plants.

Awash in pseudo-facts and snarky commentators (think Rush Limbaugh), Americans continue to drift farther from anything approaching a compassionate and well-informed culture. Indeed, many middle-class Americans have swallowed the Kool-Aid of “free-market” extremism that helps the very rich and hurts almost everyone else.

Yet, the mindless beat goes on. Limbaugh joked on Tuesday that the Japanese tragedy was some divine punishment for Japan’s environmentalism. “They’ve given us the Prius,” Limbaugh guffawed. “Even now, refugees are recycling their garbage. And yet, Gaia levels them! Just wipes them out!”

In this guest essay, Phil Rockstroh examines the reasons behind this juvenile disconnect that separates many Americans from the complexities -- and the suffering -- of the real world:

Webmaster's Commentary:

The reason for the media jokes should be obvious. General Electric designed those six reactors now showering the north Pacific with radioactive debris. Lawsuits alone will lead to trillions in losses, plus cancellation of future sales of that design, not to mention premature shutdown of existing reactors. The entire nuclear power industry is facing extinction and the only way they can survive this disaster is to convince the American people that this is no big deal, there is no danger, and the whole thing is just a silly joke that is all the fault of those gosh-darned Japanese.

So GE (which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and a whole lot of other media) has sent out the orders to just make fun of the whole situation, and insult anyone who dares express concern over the radioactivity and safety issues.

‘There is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer,’ she told Fox News TV host Bill O’Reilly.

Coulter pointed to articles in the New York Times and The Times of London to back up her argument.

‘So we should all be heading for the nuclear reactor leaking and kind of sunbathing,’ joked O’Reilly.

My Disclaimer:

I present this information in my capacity as a human being, under Common Law, exercising my fundamental God given rights and freedoms. This information represents my private thoughts and beliefs and has been compiled and expressed for educational purposes only. In no way should it be construed as either legal or financial advice. If anyone feels a need to determine the accuracy of this information and the effectiveness of apply any of it, I strongly recommend consulting a competent expert on this subject matter.

Here's a Clue:Look the one place "They" never talk about.Look to your heart, as your competent expert lies within."Seek and you shall find."